In four days I will defend my PhD thesis. As a result, I read fewer books than in prior years, but I still managed 34 or 37. Here are my favorites.
Superlative Fiction
On a July whim I restarted Slaughterhouse Five, which I’d last given up on in seventh grade, finding it dull and pretentious. Upon a reread, I can say with confidence that twelve-year-olds have all the aesthetic instinct of a suburban pigeon. Slaughterhouse turned into a Cat’s Cradle / Monkey House / Man Without a Country marathon, with Cradle being my favorite, and now I’m possibly the last reader alive to discover that Vonnegut has the stone-cold juice. Turns out that they call ’em classics for a reason.
Speaking of: next up was Melville’s Moby-Dick, or, The Whale. An unrelenting ride that ricochets between a kickdrum of Miltonian poetry (“Bear thee grimly, demigod!”) and Homeric simile (“all deep and intrepid thinking is a ship striving to keep to the open independence of the sea”). I’m near-quoting from memory, because it was the kind of prose that melts on your tongue, knocks down your soul’s load-bearing walls, and makes a home for itself. Pure vision.
Admittedly, it did take me nearly a year to finish Moby-Dick, for the same density of prose that made me love it. So I read contemporary fiction, too. Just remembering these books was enough to send me to my library website to place holds on every author here, and if that’s not convincing, then you’re a twelve-year-old.
Addison’s The Goblin Emperor is a courtly puzzlebox that makes quotidian anxieties and banal hopes resonate in time with the reader’s heartbeat (and, bonus, has nothing to do with the DND-style goblin you are imagining).
Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface sharpens fearless tech muckraking into a fierce, democratic, cyberpunk thriller. Jack Reacher wishes he had half the quirky fire of Masha Maximow.
The Searcher, like every mystery from Tana French, paints vividly humane psychological landscapes that shouldn’t be possible using her neonoir palette of Irish peat and drizzle. Spare and unsparing — and The Searcher isn’t even one of French’s bleak ones.
And finally, Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory. An ambitious space opera, a Le Guin Prize finalist, and an homage to Wilfred Owen: “Do not tell with such high zest / to children ardent for some desperate glory / the old lie: Dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori”. And it earns all three.
Dishonorable Mentions are, thankfully, not necessary this year. Check back next time.
Not Quite Books, But Still Great
The Zone of Interest made me want to immediately rewatch it, as did the brutal Killers of the Flower Moon. On the lighter side, a PacRim-worthy kaiju movie has no right to hold a mirror up to masculine hubris, but Godzilla Minus One stuck both landings.
Also, go play Tactical Breach Wizards. Not only is it a lightning-smart tactics game, but I was genuinely invested in the dialog, which has never happened to me before in the strategy genre. When your protagonist has beef with a Traffic Warlock named Steve, dramatized as an Anxiety Dream tactics puzzle, how could you not want to read more?
Superlative Nonfiction
This was the year when I finally (finally!) learned how to subdue the Protestant work ethic that has been my biggest obstacle of graduate school. More on that in a different post — therapy helped, and so did my friends and family, but these books were helpful too:
Four Thousand Weeks — that’s how long a life is, according to Oliver Burkeman. Why waste any of that beating yourself up for being an unprofitable worker? It’s a short and readable book, but I found it absent of the TED/NPR smugness endemic to self-helpy books, because there’s no trendy life-hacks that can fix onism or stop death. Two tidbits I liked. First: pick three tasks to prioritize, don’t add another until you finish or consciously abandon an existing task, and forgive yourself for everything else. Second, borrowed from Karen Rinaldi: “The freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.”
Then there’s Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job. Again, as readable as a TEDx talk, but without the moral superiority. In addition to the interviews and anecdotes, Stolzoff posed a question in this book I’ve been mulling over all year: What statements can I make about myself that don’t depend on my work output? Here are some of my answers, and I challenge you to write down your own:
- i love watching birds so much that i do not care whether i suck at it.
- i am happier when i am curious.
- i am kind and agreeable.
- i like to read.
See you next year.