In 2019, I completed 56 books. I am #blessed with the idle time, income, and inclination to improve my intellect, and I view it as my duty to report back to you on what I found useful and why. These were my favorite 10 I got through in the previous calendar year. I hope you’ll find something here that you will enjoy, read, and then talk to me about. As usual, there is no order to this list, save that my favorite book of the year will receive the ultimate spot. Before we get to the list proper, some honorable mentions:
· This Is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
· The End Is Always Near – Dan Carlin
· Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence – Ajay Agarwal, Avi Goldfarb, and Joshua Gans
· Are U OK? A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health – Kati Morton
· Thinking In Bets – Annie Duke
Beastie Boys Book – Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz
Now here’s a little story I’ve got to tell about three bad brothers you know so well: It started way back in history with Ad-Rock, MCA, and the Mike D.
At 600 pages and about 13 hours of audiobook content, it is both bemusing and shameful to me that the biggest, heftiest reading I did in 2019 was about the profoundly, purposefully unserious Beastie Boys. And my goodness, what a trip it was. Growing up, I wasn’t necessarily a Beastie Boys fan, but as a kid coming of age in the 1990’s and 2000’s, I picked up some of it just through osmosis. They seemed ambient, part of the sonic landscape. I knew the hits, but I didn’t know much about the Boys themselves. So it was an absolute joy to read about their early lives as punks, listening to The Clash, Bad Brains, and basically all the other hardcore and punk bands I became obsessed with after reading Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life.
This book was a comprehensive story of their coming of age and a love letter to the New York City of the 1970’s and 80’s. Told in a series of short essays, memoirs, and vignettes, this is the most beautiful, unique book I’ve seen this year. And I mean that literally: it is almost equal parts art and essay. In addition to rare photos and promotional artwork, it includes a comic book about a disastrous show the Boys played in Philly; it includes a Beastie Boys themed cookbook! Every page is a new visual reward. Like in their music, they’ve thrown everything into the mixing pot, and the results are as compelling as their music.
Perhaps most impressive, this book made me miss and mourn a person I never knew anything about: MCA, Adam Yauch. Ad-Rock and Mike D continually praise their dearly departed bandmate as the creative force behind the group. The credo of their lives? “What Would Yauch Do?”
The Beastie Boys Book is a damn good time, is what it is. As mentioned, I paired book and audiobook here. Both feature star-studded casts and are well-worth your time and money. I learned a lot about the Beastie Boys, hip-hop, the history of New York, and most importantly, I was smiling like the Cheshire Cat the whole time.
Tiny Beautiful Things – Cheryl Strayed
Dear Sugar,
I didn’t know anything about your advice column, or this book, when I saw some random IG model had posted it to their story. Something about the name stuck with me; I like tiny beautiful things, probably mostly because I’d like to self-identify as one. When I saw your work on sale on Audible shortly after this, it felt like serendipity.
I started you on my way to meet my girlfriend for lunch, and when I arrived at the Panera Bread 15 minutes later, I was ugly-crying in a parking lot. This was unlike any advice column I’d ever read, and it is one of the most human experiences I have had this year. In this book, you’ll hear from the broken, the lost, the confused – in other words, what we all are, when we’re honest with ourselves.
Cheryl’s message here is one of radical self-love, honesty, and authenticity. This does not a feel-good book make. This advice is hard, soul-rending work, for both the giver and the receiver. This is Brene Brown’s work distilled into the most pure, dense form; hits of crystal meth for your soul. The result is wisdom, and a lesson that we all must learn repeatedly: We are all struggling, hurt, and broken. Each of us fights an incredible battle. And we are all worthy of love and happiness. We just have to do the work.
Yours,
Older and Wiser
The Ethics of Authenticity – Charles Taylor
More people should know about the things that Charles Taylor did. The former President of Liberia was brought up on war crimes charges for his actions in the Sierra Leonne Civil War, and ultimately convicted for charges of unlawful killing, sexual violence, and the conscription of child soldiers.
The Charles Taylor who wrote this book was a mild-mannered Canadian[1] professor emeritus of philosophy at McGill University, who has nothing to do with the Liberian war criminal; the only possible overlap in their Venn diagrams is that I think both people should know more about what they did. [2]
What Charles Taylor has done is provided a blueprint to understanding why modern life sucks so much. Western world has swung full force toward the sanctity of the individual, where every human is treated as their own island of meaning and purpose. We have exhausted the old fictions, the stories we told ourselves about religion and our importance in the universe. God is dead, and, as Nietzsche predicted, the greatness of the deed is too great for us.
As such, our society has come to accept the ideals of authenticity: that there is a way to live your life that is uniquely yours, which rejects social pressure and convention, even maybe morality. We are told that the purpose of our lives is to live them, and that it is up to us to find purpose.
It is one of the things that has made modern life a confusing miasma of anomie. I am left to figure out not just how to survive, but what all of my life means against the backdrop of a hostile and uncaring universe. It is a Herculean task; indeed, in the Nietzschean tradition, the creation of this type of meaning system is how one qualifies as an übermensch.
Charles Taylor beautifully elucidates the trials of the modern world here, and he argues that we have badly confused what it means to be an individual and how humans create meaning. Taylor rejects the premise that the modern world pushes on us: No man is an island. Taylor charts a middle path between the individual and their greater world context, through which one can realize themselves as an individual only in reference to larger truths:
“I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters.... Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.”
Taylor’s work is a fantastic guide to the tension at the heart of the secular world. Do you feel alone, exhausted, and unable to address the systematic forces that crush you? Do you feel lost and confused and unable to build anything substantive to orient your existence? I won’t tell you that Charles Taylor has answers, but if nothing else, he will diagnose the problem for you. Charles Taylor is like Jordan Peterson, if Jordan Peterson wasn’t a hack and a fraud. More people should know his work.
Rosewater and more generally The Wormwood Trilogy – Tade Thompson
Hey, do you feel like time is accelerating and flattening and that you no longer have the ability to know if something happened last week, last month, or last year? I don’t know if it is a function of my steadily advancing age or the fact that I’ve been hit in the head a whole bunch, but I swear I’ve lost all capacity to accurately gauge when things happened in my autobiographical timeline. Indeed, this is the main reason I keep the running list of everything I get through in the year.
I bring this up because near the end of the year, I knew I was going to put either The Rosewater Insurrection or The Rosewater Redemption on this list. But imagine my sheer fucking surprise when it turns out I read Rosewater in 2019 as well.
Maybe it is like how it is hard to project yourself backwards to a lower level of competence; it’s hard to recall what you were like before you could tie your shoes or drive your car or do capoeira. I know there was a time before I did all of those things, but now they have permeated my consciousness so thoroughly it seems like they were always there. Maybe it is the same with Rosewater.
Rosewater, and its sequels, The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption collectively constitute “The Wormwood Trilogy”, and they are my favorite works of science fiction since Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. Rosewater is a thriving city in near-future Nigeria, built around an alien biodome which supplies free energy, and which also occasionally opens to spew a healing mist over the citizens. This makes Nigeria something of a Mecca for medical miracles. Not that there aren’t some side-effects: the mist sometimes works too well and brings back reanimated corpses, and the healing spores of the mist also form “the xenosphere,” a sort of psychic internet which select sensitives can navigate.
Our hero is Kaaro, the most powerful of these sensitives, and one of my favorite protagonists in recent memory. Kaaro is from the ‘scoundrel with a heart of gold’ school, and there’s nothing I like more than a charming rogue. In capoeira, there is something called a malandro, and Kaaro is malandragem par excellence. Using his psychic powers, he lies, cheats, steals, and basically looks out for himself as an interrogator for a shadowy government agency. He’s delightful, though your mileage may vary – I could easily see non-Logan people being put off by him.
Also it must be noted how clever Tade Thompson is – by using a psychic protagonist, he turns what is a first-person narrator into an omniscient narrator. Really incredible stuff done with voice and character in this book.
It is hard to explain how much fun and bonkers stuff happens in these books, and I won’t go into it here, I don’t want to spoil any of it for you. What you’ll get in these books is inventive, imaginative science fiction with an African flair. Let it seep into your bones, until you’re like me, and you can’t remember a time before it was this way.
What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems – Tony Hoagland
It seems like every year I find a new poet to obsess over; Billy Collins set my mind ablaze, and I’m now a lifetime fan of Tracy K. Smith. But in 2019, I went bonkers for Tony Hoagland, reading four books of his collected works. All of them are works of genius, able to make you think, laugh, and cry, often at once. I recommend them all, but What Narcissism Means to Me[3] stands out, probably because it was my first exposure. There’s nothing I can tell you that will sell you on this book better than Hoagland himself, so let me share with you a bit from a poem in this book that I loved, “Reasons to Survive November”
“I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.”
Tony Hoagland’s work speaks directly to my donkey soul – something I didn’t know was there before him, but that can’t be unseen now.
The Trouble with Gravity – Richard Panek
I have a contentious relationship with gravity. All of my life’s most debilitating injuries have been gravity-assisted. It’s always getting me down[4].
My enmity for the universal force aside, there are fewer subjects more mind-bending or mysterious than gravity. Action at a distance seems like it is basically magic, but the fact of the matter is that magic is fundamental to the functioning of the cosmos. This magic and mystery is at the heart of Panek’s work: “Nobody knows what gravity is, and nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is, except for scientists, who know that nobody knows what gravity is because they don’t know what gravity is.”
Panek doesn’t solve it here, obviously – you probably wouldn’t be hearing about that from a moron like me – but he does clearly trace the philosophy and science of the idea of gravity; he follows how humans have been thinking about the division of “up there” and “down here” and the force which seems to separate the two. From time immemorial, we have divided Earth and the heavens, until that notion was shattered by the discovery of universal laws – that the stuff up there and the stuff down here are of a kind, and that they both operate by the same rules.
Perhaps it couldn’t be any way but this way; the book closes with an exploration of multiverse mathematics and the anthropic principle. It is an intriguing idea in a book full of them. There may not be answers, but your mind will be warped by the questions, and isn’t that what we read for?
Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Guide to Death and Dying – Sallie Tisdale
“Hey, that’s me! I’m a future corpse!”
I think that’s what I was thinking when I picked this up. Actually, that thought is on my mind a lot[5]. Death is the eternal constant, the great mystery. One day humanity may discern how to avoid oblivion, but I’m not betting that me or mine will be the first to figure it. And so, I need excellent resources on dealing one of the hardest problems of the human condition; that it ends.
Tisdale’s works covers the whole process of death and dying, from dying to death to how to be left behind. The first problem that Tisdale tries to confront is our utter disbelief and our visceral refusal to accept that death will happen to us. As the adage goes, everyone in the army goes to war thinking the bullets will hit the unlucky bastard next to him. It’s hard to grapple honestly with the limits of our own existence; it is difficult for us to grok that, as Becker put it, we are “gods with assholes.”
There is a breakdown of what happens in dying and what needs to be attended to, helpfully categorized in the months/weeks before death, hours before death, and after the passing of the loved one. She covers how to prepare and plan for death: advanced directives and wills, finding a loved one who can advocate for you, and communicating as, or with, the dying.
It mostly comes down to being present; to trying to accept and experience what is happening, and to respect the sanctity of the moment. Tisdale draws deeply from the Buddhist tradition, with the focus on impermanence and change that this entails.
I loved this book. It made me think and it made me cry. While I hope I won’t have to use any of its lessons for a long time, I know that at some point, I will need to revisit it more urgently, and I know that on that dark day, I will be both guided and comforted by it. I am glad to have it in my library, and, as a fellow future corpse, I suspect you would be too.
The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller
I have never read a gay love story before, or any iteration of The Iliad either[6]. Now I’ve done both, and I don’t know why I waited so long: both of these things are fantastic.
The Song of Achilles is told from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ lover and confidant. It begins with young Patroclus being a great disappointment to his father, and ultimately sent away from home after an inadvertent homicide. Patroclus is given a home on Pthia, in the court of Peleus, where he meets a gorgeous, aloof prince. This is of course, Achilles, the Best of the Greeks, destined to die in glorious combat. Against all odds, Patroclus is chosen as the Prince’s companion. They become inseparable, and become lovers while under the tutelage of Chiron, the centaur. Ultimately, like all Greek literature, no one can escape their fate. Achilles is sent to Troy to fight. Through prophecy, the heroes know that Achilles cannot die, and the war cannot end, until the Greek faces Hector. The question then becomes how long Patroclus and Achilles can keep the world at war to preserve their love. It is a romance of stunning beauty.
Madeline Miller is a first-rate writer, and her love for the Classical world is palpable. She creates her own versions of well-known figures from myth; I particularly loved her takes on Ulysses, Ajax, and Thetis. The latter, Achilles’ demigod mother, is an uniquely chilling presence who torments and terrifies Patroclus throughout the novel.[7]
All in all, it is a beautiful and moving tale of love, and a faithful retelling of the world’s ultimate sword-and-sandals adventure.
I’ll also note that this year I read Madeline Miller’s Circe, and it was basically a coin-flip as to what I put on this list. Both are well-worth your time, but I ultimately went with The Song of Achilles because of the touching love story.
The End of Ice – Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail was a war reporter, embedded in Iraq for many years, and he was used to covering the most horrific events of the modern world. To decompress, he was an avid mountain and ice climber. He spent many years climbing and working search and rescue on Denali. While there, he began to notice a disturbing trend: the climbing season steadily shrinking as ice melted. It was this that started Jamail reporting on climate disruption. Since then, he has been from the Arctic to the Amazon, talking to experts about a variety of climate disruption challenges.
His conclusions are dire. To put it bluntly, this book introduced me to the concept of “Climate Grief.”[8] Whether looking at coral bleaching in Australia, “sunny day flooding” in Florida, the loss of biodiversity in the Amazon, or rapidly melting permafrost in the arctic, the evidence is consistent and damning. We are very unlikely to halt the general warming of the planet at the already-disastrous 2°C threshold; most experts Jamail spoke to predict more like a 4-6° warming, particularly as warming effects compound on each other into a vicious cycle. One such example is melting permafrost releasing methane, which contributes to further warming. The End of Ice may not be a hyperbole.
This book was as important as it was depressing. It honestly reckons with what we have done by living as a thing apart from nature, and it is about appreciating what is left of the natural world and our civilization while we have it. I don’t know what else to say. I think I’m going to take the author up on his only advice: go to the mountains, sit in nature, and be grateful for the time I have had, and the time we have left.
Why Buddhism Is True – Robert Wright
My favorite book of 2019 was Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True.
Wright has created a remarkable synthesis of two important, disparate schools of thought: it is a fusion of Buddhism and evolutionary psychology. They are strange bedfellows indeed, but Wright makes a convincing argument for their overlapping magesteria. One of the core tenets of both traditions is that the human brain (or mind) is not designed to show us reality as it really is.
Quite to the contrary, it is designed to delude us. In evolutionary terms, our brains have been shaped by natural selection for genetic propagation, not capital T Truth and certainly not for long-term happiness. In Buddhist terms, we find the trouble of identifying with our thoughts or our desires. In both, we are deluded in matters both metaphysical and moral; the flaws in our minds can lead us to mistaken assumptions about the nature of things both “in here” inside our own subjective experiences and “out there” in the external world. These align to the Buddhist truths of not-self and the concept of emptiness: that we have no essential essence to ourselves, and that the world as we see it is not objective either, but it is rather a collaboration between us and environment. Buddhism itself is a practice of disavowing “essentialism” in all of its ugly faces. There is nothing essential about how we experience ourselves and our world, and this is a remarkable perspective shift from our normal view of reality.
In the tradition of Buddhism, Robert Wright finds both “an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure.” In practicing Buddhism, and through mindfulness meditation in particular, we can come to see how we are deluded about the self and the world, and, in doing so, can come to reduce our suffering.
As such, Buddhism is True. It helps us understand our predicament and why our minds and our views of the world can be subtly deceived. It can help us see ourselves and our world more clearly and help us question assumptions that we may not even realize as assumptions.
This was my best book of the year, and it made me excited to learn and practice more Buddhism, as well as to read more Robert Wright.[9] One of the most impressive parts of this book was how clearly Wright… writes… about two subject matters than can be opaque and arcane. He is a wonderful and lucid communicator. I think what he has done here is remarkably enlightening; it has changed how I think about myself, my world, and my spirituality; and it is my favorite book of 2019.
[1] Redundant, I know.
[2] Also, yes, every single time I’ve ever written about Charles Taylor, I make this joke. No, I am not going to stop. Mixing up Canadian philosophers and Liberian war criminals will never not be funny to me.
[3] Funny story: One of the many ways my brother-in-law is excellent is his love of poetry, so I gifted him this book for Christmas. He opened it and announced aloud to the family, “Logan got me ‘What Narcissism Means to Me’!” For a minute, my sister was both very mad and very confused about why I’d gotten her husband a book about dealing with his narcissism.
[4] Boo, hiss.
[5] Or, at least, avoiding the fact of death is usually on my mind. Life is what distracts us from death. More on this later.
[6] Redundant, I know. Indeed, the point Miller is making is that The Iliad, one of the first works of the Western canon is properly understood as a gay adventure romance novel.
[7] And you thought your mother-in-law was bad!
[8] It is what it sounds like. We have done too much damage, and there are no signs of it slowing down. All that is left to do is grieve.
[9] His podcast, The Wright Show, is also predictably excellent. I also, predictably, recommend his appearance on Very Bad Wizards.