Reading

Books, 2022

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This was a slow reading year for me. I don’t really recall why. I do remember getting stuck in one long book that sometimes I just didn’t have the energy to get back into. I watched some TV, picked up a new hobby (blacksmithing), and committed myself pretty heavily to hurling, including lots of travel that took up precious reading time. Ah, and I spent a big portion of the middle of the year working on a political campaign, which took the vast bulk of my remaining time for months (we lost). Anyway, I read 26 books.

Four-Star Books

Three-Star Books

Two-Star Books

Fantasy

Sci-Fi

Authors of Color

Authors Who Are Not Men

Comics

Nonfiction

Books, 2021

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I read 30 books this year — a significant dip from prior years. I watched a bit of TV and in particular I watched a lot of hurling from the spring through the summer. I also focused more on playing hurling than I have in previous years. I don’t remember what else I did, really. I tuned into local politics some and did some COVID-related data/coding projects. I had a concussion in early October that really slowed me down. Surely there was other stuff. Some of the books I read took me a while to get through, and several I read slowly and carefully with a group online, which was both rewarding and time-consuming. Here’s what I did manage to read this year, grouped by star rating (I’m stingy with 5-star reviews) and then by some other categories I tend to track.

Four-Star Books

Three-Star Books

Two-Star Books

Fantasy

Nonfiction

LGBTQIA+

Young Adult

Authors of Color

Authors Who Are Not Men

Reading, 2020

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I read a scant 44 books this year, down from 67 last year and 100 in 2018. It’s weird, since I felt like I had read pretty consistently. One factor is that I led an in-depth group read of Adam Levin’s Bubblegum in the middle part of the year. This took 9 or 10 weeks of focused reading and thinking and writing during which I might otherwise have read a few other books. I also read a handful of long books that took a fair bit of time. And I false-started on a few (not listed below). Finally, this was the dreaded year during which my youngest child lost interest in our nightly routine of reading aloud (my eldest having lost interest a couple of years ago), and this change partway through the year will have diminished my number a bit too. The number of books doesn’t mean much, but I feel oddly self-conscious about a significantly reduced amount of reading. I did also watch a lot of TV. And I continued to spend a lot of time prepping and playing D&D — time I would in previous years have devoted to reading.

31 of the 44 books were written by women, 17 by people I believe would identify as non-white. I mention it because I’ve been trying for a few years to avoid reading mostly (straight) white men, and I like to keep loose track of how I’m doing at getting outside my own experience of the world. I read a mix of fantasy, nonfiction, social justice, literary fiction, and even a couple of books of poems and a play. I read some people I had heard of and also branched out to read well-known authors who were new to me or random finds from my local bookshop, which I’ve tried to patronize a little extra this year.

Highlights this year were Ducks, Newburyport, The Greenlanders, Bubblegum and The Instructions, How to Be an Antiracist, The Nickel Boys, and The Last Samurai. I enjoyed most of the books I read this year, with only a small handful of two-star books and no one-star books.

I list the books below by rating and by a few non-comprehensive categories of my own devising.

FIVE-STAR BOOKS

  • How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi

FOUR-STAR BOOKS

  • Horse Heaven, by Jane Smiley
  • Patsy, by Nicole Dennis-Benn
  • The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt
  • Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds
  • Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
  • Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi
  • The River, by Peter Heller
  • The Fearless Organization, by Amy C. Edmondson
  • Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt
  • A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry
  • The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • Sugar Money, by Jane Harris
  • The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
  • Thick: And Other Essays, by Tressie McMillan Cottom
  • Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, by Kai Cheng Thom
  • How We Fight for our Lives, by Saeed Jones
  • Bubblegum, by Adam Levin
  • The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  • The Instructions, by Adam Levin
  • Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellman
  • Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, by Kathleen Rooney

THREE-STAR BOOKS

  • The Paper Wasp, by Lauren Acampora
  • The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, by Shokoofeh Azar
  • The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
  • Hot Pink, by Adam Levin
  • Tracks, by Louise Erdrich
  • Eternity: Selected Poems, by Tracy K. Smith
  • Dragonsdawn, by Anne McCaffrey
  • Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey
  • The Court Dancer, by Shin Kyung-sook
  • Dragonquest, by Anne McCaffrey
  • Hard Mouth, by Amanda Goldblatt
  • Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, by Francisco de Quevedo and Anonymous
  • Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

TWO-STAR BOOKS

  • The Bingo Palace, by Louise Erdrich
  • Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield
  • An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green

NOT STARRED

  • A Radical Shift of Gravity, by Nick Tapalansky
  • Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, by Wizards of the Coast

NONFICTION

  • How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
  • Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds
  • The Fearless Organization, by Amy C. Edmondson
  • Thick: And Other Essays, by Tressie McMillan Cottom
  • How We Fight for our Lives, by Saeed Jones

LGBTQIA

  • Patsy, by Nicole Dennis-Benn
  • Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi
  • Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, by Kai Cheng Thom
  • How We Fight for our Lives, by Saeed Jones

FANTASY

  • The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
  • The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Dragonsdawn, by Anne McCaffrey
  • Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey
  • Dragonquest, by Anne McCaffrey
  • Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
  • Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, by Wizards of the Coast
  • Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi

YOUNG ADULT

  • Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds
  • The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green

Bookshelves #20

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Bookshelf #20 keeps us still mostly in the neutral colors, but a rare and only approximate additional organizational scheme emerges here. These are mostly books of poems and/or books (poems, anthologies, and a couple of essay collections) written or edited by one of my college professors, who I looked to as a mentor (meaning mostly that I attended probably every single weekly office hours session he offered for the four or so semesters I studied with him). I like McFee’s poetry and his essays, however biased I may be, having also admired him as a professor.

The other thin poetry books are ones I’ve liked quite a lot. Chitwood taught at my university starting some time after I graduated and is buddies with McFee. Hudgins writes really great stuff. The Donald Hall book is full of feeling about his experience with the death of his wife, writer Jane Kenyon. Ferlinghetti is always fun (I heard him give a reading at my university some 24 years ago and it was marvelous and made me a fan, even though I never did have much of a thing for the beats in general). Wrigley writes these marvelous meditations (as the title of the one selected works anthology suggests), often involving animals (as the title of the other suggests). I don’t read a whole lot of poetry these days, but he’s a poet I can dip into at any time and feel good about, rather than, as I’ve often done, kind of shaking my head and wondering what is even happening here. Atsuro Riley I wrote about nearly 16 years ago here. The Oyster book I own because acquaintance and artist Matt Kish did the cover art and I wanted to support that. I dip into most of these books occasionally when thinking about trying to get back into reading more poetry, though usually I find that while these books are pleasing to me, most of the other stuff I run into is less so.

Nestled in among the poems are two books by David Foster Wallace, both well worth reading (but if you’re new to Wallace, start with the lobster book; his essays are often a good gateway to his work, and Oblivion has some especially challenging or abstruse stories in it that to my mind make it not the best starting point).

Evan Dara is a puzzle. Nobody seems to know if he’s real or if he’s some other author incognito. Many loved this book. I don’t remember much at all about it, though my Goodreads review tells me that I found much of it sort of annoying and the last 120 pages dazzling, and that it was one I’d likely want to revisit.

The Bright Hour is a memoir a college friend and classmate in my poetry classes in college wrote as she was dying of cancer. I’m biased because I knew her when we were young and have lots of positive memories of her early work and of her sensitive and nuanced workshop feedback, and the book thus feels a little personal to me, but I did think it was a beautifully written book. The little volume stacked on top of it is a chapbook she published a few years before her diagnosis.

Finally, there’s an Ondaatje book a colleague who loves Ondaatje recommended as a way of seeing a bit into some of the culture of Sri Lanka.

And finally finally, there are a few more poetry books stacked behind these, but none that I recall as being especially worth a mention.

Next up are two shelves of recipe books, which I may give only an appetizer-sized treatment of.

Books, 2019

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I read 67 books in 2019, significantly down from the prior couple of years. A couple of things contributed to this slowdown. One, I began devoting a lot more time to playing Dungeons and Dragons, which requires lots of reading and writing and planning of its own that is time I would otherwise have spent with regular old prose books. Two, my family reading slowed down a lot. We went through several books that were real slogs, we stopped one in the middle, and we skipped a lot more nights this year than we’re used to skipping, as we had more evening commitments. I learned last year not to focus overmuch on how many books I had read, but in general I also just felt this year like I was a shallower or less committed reader. I spent a week or two each false-starting on rereads of two Pynchon books (Against the Day and V) and Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (this was the family read we stalled out on, though I would’ve liked to’ve continued, as it was a reread I was enjoying). I read the first 2ish books of the Lord of the Rings series to my family, but we stalled in the middle for no good reason and moved on (this was a second or third family read-through, in any case). I read a lot of fantasy this year — much of it related to D&D — and a lot more science fiction and nonfiction than I had remembered. Seven of these were rereads (in addition to the three rereads I stopped partway through).

30 of the 67 books were written by women and 16 by people of color. Another was edited by a woman of color. This feels like a pretty poor showing with respect to the diversity of my reading — far better than my reading in 2015 after which year I began paying closer attention to diversity in my reading but far worse still than my reading in 2016 and even in 2018 when only about a third of my reads were by straight white men. So, I still have some room to keep expanding my horizons beyond the experience closest to my own.

Highlights were Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, a couple of the Drizzt books by R.A. Salvatore, J R by Gaddis (though I liked it less on this my third or fourth full reading of this book than I did prior times), The White Goddess (which made me use my brain as much as any book I read this year), Confessions of Max Tivoli, So You Want to Talk About Race, and the first two books of Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy.

Here go the books by rating:

Five-Star Books

  • J R, by William Gaddis

Four-Star Books

Three-Star Books

Two-Star Books

One-Star Books

And now the same books broken into a few categories:

Nonfiction

Fantasy

Science Fiction

Young-Adult or Kid Lit

Podcasts

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Many years ago, I briefly ran a podcast as part of my job. This was during the early days of Web 2.0 when podcasting was a new thing that one sort of just had to try if they were doing my sort of job for a Web 2.0 company. I was pretty terrible at it, and I never much cared for listening to podcasts until the last year or two. I’ve long sort of disdained nonfiction stuff and tended to want to absorb fiction more slowly, via books. For anything newsy or simply informative (if I must consume it), I’ve tended to prefer reading, which lets me skim quickly for the important info without spending a lot of time with the material. I shake my fist at news sites that try to show me a video reporting something I can read in a fraction of the time.

But over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself in the car a lot more. Although I still work from home, I drive kids to and from school, I do some of my grocery shopping across town, and I more routinely venture out of the house for social or sporty events. Car time has always felt like wasted time to me. I can’t read during car time! But I can listen to things and make that time entertaining or useful. So I’ve tried a number of podcasts over the last couple of years. Here are some that I’m currently enjoying or enjoy dipping into occasionally, in no particular order.

The Memory Palace. Nate DiMeo offers lyrical dispatches about little snippets of history. I like this one for its lyricism and brevity. I can listen to an episode on a short grocery run and enjoy not only its content but also the poetry of DiMeo’s writing. I was a poetry person many years ago, and this one sounds like a poetry reading for better or for worse. To me, it’s soothing and puts me in a little different mental state than usual, though my wife listened to an episode once and immediately had a “that guy sounds like he really thinks a lot of himself, how annoying” sort of reaction, which is fair of this sort of artificial, almost “posed” reading. I listen to this one not super regularly, but I like to have it on my phone for when I’m in the mood or have just the right amount of time for a quick listen.

RadioLab. My wife turned me on to this one, and I really enjoy it. You’ve likely heard of it. The stories, whose topics vary a lot across disciplines as distinct from one another as sports, politics, science, art, technology, history, and memoir, are well researched and well reported. I like the hosts a lot, and I almost always learn something fascinating or feel enriched.

99% Invisible. I’ve always thought of this one as Radiolab-lite. It focuses loosely on the designed world, but that’s a much more reductive description than the actual scope of the podcast. As with RadioLab, topics are varied, and I almost always find the show enriching, funny, or educational. It’s usually a little shorter than RadioLab, so it’s easier to finish one in a single trip to and from an errand across town.

Still Processing. This one really stands out as a favorite. A couple of culture writers from the New York Times chat weekly about topics generally pertaining to race and culture. Rather than mostly giving me information or entertaining me, this one makes me think hard about my place in a racist society (but also gives me information and entertains me). The show went quiet for a few months over the Fall and I felt bereft. It’s back up and running now with a couple of great new episodes, and I was so relieved to learn that they were on a break and not canceled.

Anthropocene Reviewed. I like John Green as a purveyor of thought and culture. I’ve offered mixed personal reviews of some of his books, but John Green as a human in the world I feel very positive about. In this podcast, he shares starred reviews of often oddly juxtaposed things that have emerged in the human-dominated era of history. He has reviewed things like pineapple pizza, Googling yourself, Tetris, and the Piggly Wiggly. The stars he awards are really an afterthought; the substance here is in the brief histories he shares and the meditations on the human experience. Episodes are brief, funny, informative, and sometimes profound. I could imagine that Green’s writing or delivery might be annoying to some, but I’m a fan. I give Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.

The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry. A scientist and a mathematician expand upon their BBC Radio show to offer a little more information and more laughs as they try to find answers to science questions listeners send in. The investigations tend to be a little cursory and unsatisfying, but I like the hosts’ dynamic and often find that I learn a little something and enjoy giggling at their schtick.

Nerdette. I’ve listened to only a few of these so far, but I’m enjoying them. The hosts talk about issues that impact women — e.g. the ongoing wage gap and a fight to narrow it — and so far I’ve found the show entertaining and informative. I like that it offers me a view of issues and perspectives I might not be very plugged into otherwise.

I’ve got a number of other podcasts on my phone that I listen to only sporadically, that were limited runs, or that I’ve found tempting but haven’t dipped into yet. I’ve listened to a couple of the Serial podcasts, for example, and another single-season show called Bundyville that I found really great and then learned that some of my colleagues had worked on. I occasionally listen to episodes of Chris Hayes’s Why is This Happening, for a while I was listening to Ear Hustle, and I’ve got Bookworm, The Read, Pod Save the People, and The Trouble, and Reply All lined up for a listen someday, but I’ve got only so much time in the car, and I spend most of my other free time with my nose stuck in a book.

Bookshelves #15

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Here we end the penultimate row in my bookshelves series. Along the top there you see various and sundry notebooks I’ve picked up over the last few years for long-hand writing and a spiral sketch-pad I bought when briefly (and it turns out optimistically) thinking “I’d like to learn how to draw.” I don’t know why these’ve landed in this cubby, but they have.

The Burned Children of America is a short story anthology I got because it had a David Foster Wallace story in it. It also has several other good stories by well-known authors of Wallace’s generation like Saunders, Eugenides, Bender, Moody, Lethem, Lipsyte, and Foer, and it’s got one by Julia Slavin that really knocked my socks off.

I first tried reading Ulysses probably 20 years ago, and probably three or four times after that failed attempt, I started it and didn’t get very far at all past stately, plump Buck Mulligan. Finally, back in 2010, I led an online group read of the book and did make it through. I surely didn’t love every minute of the book, but I was glad to get through it at last, and though at the time, I said I didn’t know if I’d ever read it again, I suspect I probably will (and indeed have been feeling the itch a bit lately). This one I’ll hang onto if only to avoid sending my silly margin notes out into the world for others to read.

I don’t love this Moby-Dick children’s book, but I keep Moby-Dick books. I did read this one to my kids a lot when they were little.

I apparently misread Americanah. It read as a fundamentally sad book to me, but Adichie apparently laughed all the way through writing it. I think my misreading stems from my discomfort taking as comical the struggles of characters whose experience (and whose sense of humor about it) is so very far removed from my own privileged experience. Anyway, misread or not, I didn’t love it, but I do think Adichie is a fantastic novelist (her Half of a Yellow Sun garnered a rare 5-star Goodreads review from me and is one of my favorite reads of the last few years), and I’ll likely reassess this one at some point.

I remember nothing about Your Fathers…, but Goodreads suggests that I liked it quite a lot. I suppose I’ll look at it again some day.

When I was in college many years ago, regional author Alan Gurganus gave a reading that I believe was from Plays Well With Others, though I don’t recall whether the book had yet been published. I don’t remember loving the reading, but I did go out and read his well-known Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which I forget how I felt about. And at some point, I picked up this book, which I vaguely recall as being biting and sort of angry and sometimes probably a little boring and sometimes very funny. I’ve read a little bit more by Gurganus since and not loved it, but I would like to try this one again in the future, as I was still a pretty young reader when I last went through it.

I had never read Watership Down until we picked it up as a family read a few years ago. I had always assumed it was some sort of naval adventure based on the name (though that actually doesn’t make sense either). I loved it. It’s so well imagined and just awfully well put together. I recently suggested a reread to my family.

Tristram Shandy was a real labor. I read it as part of reading a series of sort of foundational frame tales a few years ago. Yes, parts of it are hilarious, but it’s also just so very tedious and annoying that it was a real labor for me to get through. I tend to retry the hard ones, though, so I imagine I’ll go back to it again some day.

I have a probably irrational antipathy for Jonathan Franzen. I thought The Corrections was reasonably well written, and I really hated Freedom, which just felt ham-handed and improbable (though in the realist tradition) and dumb. I didn’t read Purity because by the time it came out, I had read enough of Franzen’s other work and read enough things about him that I just didn’t really want to be connected to more of his work. I think that if his books really did the trick for me, I could put the antipathy aside, but I really just don’t think the work is all that good either. I’ve never read this earlier book of his, but I hang onto it just in case I brush this chip off my shoulder one day and decide to give him another chance, as I’ve heard this is a good one (but I mean you hear that about all his books).

Tom McCarthy generally writes things that tickle some fancy of other of mine. It’s been a bit since I read C, but I vaguely recall it as sort of Pynchon-lite in its treatment of war, technology, and spiritualism. I’ll generally try anything this guy writes and think of him as somebody to maybe revisit overall one day.

Ah, Mencken, what a troll. I first encountered him in a Southern literature class in college, and I bought this anthology of his work a few years later to get a broader sampling. I’ve never read it cover-to-cover, but it seems like the kind of thing I might dip back into from time to time for topical readings.

Next time, I’ll do a carriage return to the next shelf of cubbies, which features some good books but also a bunch of cookbooks that I won’t likely go into detail about and a mysterious background layer of books that hides some of my deepest shames.

BookNotes.blog

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I read a fair bit, and increasingly, I’m kind of holding my nose and reading business-oriented books in hopes of leveling up my game as a worker who leads people. A couple of years ago, I might have struggled more with technology challenges in my work, as I was writing code and chiefly leading people who were writing code. About a year-and-a-half ago, I took on a split role in which I was still leading a team of developers but was also leading a handful of leads in our support division (the division under which my developer team worked). In the latter portion of 2017, I switched my full-time focus to leading leads, and at present I have 10 folks under my direct care and about 70 under my care directly or indirectly. This tightening of focus gives me more mental bandwidth to spend on learning how to improve as a leader than I had had previously, when I was also focusing on how to be a producer of software. Now I think a lot more about things like trying to help articulate and execute a vision for the departments I work with, helping navigate change more effectively, designing and implementing programs in the service of professional development for the folks in my overall department, and other abstract things I hadn’t had a lot of prior experience with.

So I’ve really ramped up my focus on reading business-oriented books. I don’t typically enjoy this kind of writing. I prefer to get lost in an imagined story or to think about the architecture and plumbing — the technique — that goes into making a piece of fiction resonant and innovative or just well put-together. I don’t generally like the tone that self-styled gurus can strike, and I think there’s a lot of this tone in the world of business books. I have tended to find these kinds of books kind of boring, or at any rate inapplicable to my life and thus not useful. Well, now, with a more intense focus on the kind of work these books tend to address, I’m finding the practice of reading them more useful.

For a couple of years now, I’ve kept very brief remind-myself sorts of reviews at GoodReads, but these aren’t comprehensive at all or really useful to anybody but me. Part of my goal in developing myself as a lead is to also help develop the leads I work with. One way of doing this is to act as a sort of — I forget where this colorful term came from, but it applies here — a shit umbrella for the things I’m reading. That is, I’d like to be able to tell people “it’s not worth your time to read this book; its salient points are A, B, and C, but you don’t need to kill time reading the whole book” or “this book is well worth a deeper read and will help you further develop your thoughts on X.” Because I’m forgetful, my path to providing this sort of service is to take better notes on the things I’m reading and to go ahead as soon as I finish something and determine whether I think it’s worth somebody else’s time or not.

To that end, I’ve started BookNotes.blog. I tend in general toward maximalism in my writing, but here I’m trying to offer brief summaries with in most cases a verdict about whether the book is worth a closer read or not. My hope is that this’ll help me preserve my verdicts and memories of these books in a way that’s useful to others.  I’m just one shit umbrella with one opinion, of course, so it’s worth only whatever the value of my specific opinion is. At some point, I may invite others to contribute to the blog as well. My summaries aren’t terribly incisive or consistent in rigor or tone. But there they are, for whatever they may be worth — if you’re thinking of reading a business-oriented book and have found conversations with me about books to be worthwhile, maybe these short articles will help you decide where to spend some of your reading attention, or where not to.

Books, 2017

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I read more books and more pages this year than I’ve read in any year since I’ve been tracking fairly reliably, finishing the year with 89 books and about 30,000 pages (whatever that means, since I don’t always find the same edition I read, and sometimes I’m reading on a Kindle). My prior best (if we can call volume or quantity a superlative) was 75 books for 26k pages in 2015. This year I averaged about 340 pages per book, and in 2015, I averaged about 347, so I really did just read a lot more this year. My longest book this year was 1280 pages (took me five weeks to read that one) and my shortest was about 90.

I had a fair few four-star books this year, which makes me wonder whether I read better books or whether I lowered my standards somehow. A five-star book is a rarity for me in any case, and typically a four-star book is one I would recommend to somebody pretty enthusiastically, though not necessarily one I’d recommend to everybody. A three-star book is one I enjoyed and might recommend but wouldn’t recommend unreservedly. Anything lower than that I probably wouldn’t recommend.

Last year, I made an effort to read almost all things written not by straight white dudes after noticing a dearth of such authors in my 2015 reading list. I wasn’t as monomaniacal about it this year and wound up reading a little more than half straight white dudes. I did the bulk of my pleasure reading from the library this year, though I bought a few things. I intentionally read a bit more fantasy and sci-fi, which I’ve been a bit snobbish about in the past. This is partially due to my family’s selection of some fantasy stuff for our read-alouds (we read the first four of the Wheel of Time series and started the fifth this year), but I’ve gone out of my way to read some of this stuff on my own too, with varied results. Here at the end of the year, I’ve read a few mystery novels by Rex Stout, whom I remember reading as a kid. I may make mystery novels a bit of a theme in 2018 and generally continue to explore genre fiction a bit more. I read a few things for work and in general read a bit more nonfiction than I usually do (I’ve also reinstated my Harper’s subscription after a lapse of a few years).

Real standouts for me this year were Jerusalem by Alan Moore and We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. The former I think may be one of the great ambitious, important books written in my lifetime, and it is definitely not one I would recommend unreservedly for anybody and everybody. The latter seemed just ridiculously well written; even when it wasn’t the absolute most interesting thing to read, it was so well put together that it was a pleasure to spend time with. Whitehead, Le Guin, and Erdrich were also standouts this year.

Four star books included the following:

  • Night by Elie Wiesel
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
  • Jerusalem by Alan Moore
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (a reread)
  • We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
  • Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (a reluctant 4-star review; I’m embarrassed to have enjoyed it, but I did)
  • Doc by Mary Doria Russell
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
  • Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka
  • Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath
  • The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin
  • Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin
  • The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders
  • The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
  • The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
  • John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • The Best American Short Stories 2017 by various
  • Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem
  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
  • Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
  • Postcards by Annie Proulx
  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (a reread)
  • A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe

Three star books include the following:

  • Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
  • Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
  • Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
  • The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time #1) by Robert Jordan
  • The Great Hunt (Wheel of Time #2) by Robert Jordan
  • The Dragon Reborn (Wheel of Time #3) by Robert Jordan (read aloud to the family)
  • The Shadow Rising (Wheel of Time #4) by Robert Jordan (read aloud to the family)
  • Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1 and #2) by Gene Wolfe
  • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp
  • Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
  • Slade House by David Mitchell
  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
  • Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick
  • Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
  • Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
  • Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
  • The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
  • The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin
  • Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
  • Othello by Shakespeare
  • A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • The Best American Essays 2017
  • Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr
  • The Maze Runner by James Dashner (read aloud to the family)
  • Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
  • Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
  • Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  • Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone
  • Local Souls by Allan Gurganus
  • Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet
  • Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead
  • Leading Change by John Kotter
  • The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout
  • V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

Two-star books:

  • The Circle by Dave Eggers
  • Meaty by Samantha Irby
  • The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • The Dragon’s Tooth by N.D. Wilson (read aloud to the family)
  • Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie
  • The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout
  • Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  • Ariel by Sylvia Plath
  • You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
  • The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017
  • Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Sword & Citadel (The Book of the New Sun #3 and #4) by Gene Wolf
  • The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

Some books I don’t rate, usually because I have some personal connection to it or its author in real life (which makes rating them feel weird), which is the case for each of these three:

  • We Were Once Here by Michael McFee
  • The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs
  • The Woman Who Lived Amongst the Cannibals by Robert Kloss

I’ve grouped many of the books listed above into categories below. Anything that appears below also appears above, so read on only if you’re curious about the groupings.

Dystopia

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (a reread)
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (a reread)
  • The Maze Runner by James Dashner (read aloud to the family)
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  • V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

Nonfiction

  • Night by Elie Wiesel
  • Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath
  • The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders
  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
  • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp
  • Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
  • Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
  • The Best American Essays 2017
  • The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  • Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone
  • Meaty by Samantha Irby
  • Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie
  • The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs
  • Leading Change by John Kotter
  • The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

Sci-fi

  • Fahrenheit 451
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
  • Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1 and #2) by Gene Wolfe
  • Sword & Citadel (The Book of the New Sun #3 and #4) by Gene Wolf
  • Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick
  • The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
  • Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017
  • Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein

Fantasy

  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin
  • Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin
  • The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin
  • Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
  • The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time #1) by Robert Jordan
  • The Great Hunt (Wheel of Time #2) by Robert Jordan
  • The Dragon Reborn (Wheel of Time #3) by Robert Jordan
  • The Shadow Rising (Wheel of Time #4) by Robert Jordan
  • The Dragon’s Tooth by N.D. Wilson (read aloud to the family)
  • The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Not Straight White Dudes

  • We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
  • Doc by Mary Doria Russell
  • The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
  • Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilak
  • The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
  • Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
  • The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin
  • Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin
  • The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin
  • The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
  • John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
  • Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
  • Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead
  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
  • Postcards by Annie Proulx
  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (a reread)
  • A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
  • Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  • Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
  • Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
  • Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet
  • Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
  • Local Souls by Allan Gurganus
  • Meaty by Samantha Irby
  • Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch
  • Ariel by Sylvia Plath
  • The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs

For work

  • Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath
  • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  • Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone
  • Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie
  • Leading Change by John Kotter
  • The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

Books, 2016

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Oops, I apparently never published this post at the end of 2016. I discovered it only after writing up a draft of my book list for 2017. So I’ll post this now and my 2017 list once the year wraps up. These are books from 2016. When I mention “this year,” I mean 2016; when I mention “last year,” I mean 2015.

Last year, I recorded having read 74 books for a total of 25,500 pages. I fell a little behind this year, logging 67 books and 22,107 pages, which I suppose is still respectable enough. Last year I padded my book count some by reading the 13 books in the Series of Unfortunate Events series to my kids and participating as fully as I could in the Tournament of Books, which required a sort of mania to manage. Much of this year in reading to the kids was consumed by reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, which contributed to the page count (these are 800+ pages apiece if I recall correctly) but added a paltry three books to the list. This year I read almost all things that were new to me (To Kill a Mockingbird was the exception, though I hadn’t read it in 25 years, so it was sort of new all over again), and I tried a different approach to picking what to read.

When writing last year’s summary of my reading, I noticed that I was reading mostly white American men. Since I am a white American man, I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense, but I figured it was time to broaden my horizons a bit, and the best way to do that is intentionally. So I made 2016 the year of reading people who weren’t white American/English/Canadian dudes. Brandon Sanderson and a late read of a Heinlin book (which gets logged on 2017 anyway) aside, I managed to avoid white guys. My failures were concessions to my family, who didn’t necessarily want to go along on my personal journey, though I dragged them along for some of it. The Sanderson at least featured a strong female protagonist; the Heinlein was a late break for my wife, who couldn’t bear another soporific read-aloud of Agatha Christie (who my children oddly really like).

So, how did I pick all these books by non-white men? Sometimes it was more or less at random. I actually browsed a little local bookstore a lot (enough that they got in the habit of thanking me not for my purchase but for my “contribution,” as if the sometimes not insignificant purchase was an act of charity) and read book covers to see what looked interesting. The store — Union Avenue Books —  has a small new paperback collection (I’m generally not charitable enough to buy in hardback) that rotates frequently enough that I could stop by and pick up a stack of six or eight books to last a month or two and find a fair few different books on my next stop. I basically profiled authors by looking for names that seemed unlikely to belong to white men, and when possible I would confirm by looking for an author photo or bio. It felt a little weird to physically profile people, and I consoled myself that it was ok since it was in the service of expanding my perspective to include the perspectives of people whose work I had not actively sought out before, but I’m still not sure it was actually ok. In any case, what’s done is done.

One thing I found was that when trying not to read white dudes, it’s very very easy to read white women. I read more white women than I really wanted to, to the extent that it felt a little cheaty, since though they do have a different experience of the world than white men, it seems very probable to me that overall, the experience these (I suspect largely entitled) women have of the world is probably very much more like the experience I have of the world than the experience of, say, a Nigerian Jesuit.

Now a word about my GoodReads rating system. First, I wish they allowed partial stars, as often I find five-star granularity to be insufficient for expressing how I feel about a book. Some books are better than three stars but not quite 4 stars, and it’s frustrating that I can’t express that in my quantifiable review. I tend to rate down, I guess because I’m a little snobbish and don’t want to elevate a book that didn’t really do it for me. So, a five-star book is basically transcendental for me; it changed my worldview or offered a perspective or a beauty of writing that made me really want to put it in a very small group of favorite books. A four-star book is very good and I liked it a lot (maybe even loved it a little) or found it exceedingly worthwhile even if not altogether enjoyable to get through. A three-star book I liked just fine. A two-star book I didn’t like much at all. A one-star book I pretty much hated. An abandoned book is very very rare for me, and I abandoned one this year (The Night Circus — irredeemable, and I wish I could bill the author for my time).

Of the books I read this year, I gave no books five stars but gave these 18 books four stars:

There were a few surprises here for me, notably the presence of some genre fiction in A Wizard of Earthsea (I wanted to continue the series but my daughter wasn’t digging it; I’ll likely revisit on my own later) and Epitaph, which is a loosely historical novel that isn’t at all the sort of thing I tend to pick up. Groff was a new find for me this year, and what a great find. The Vegetarian was more of a 3.5, but I rated it up rather than down because it was a bit of a puzzler for me, and I’m intrigued by puzzlers even if I don’t strictly like or enjoy them. I was glad to find Mason’s book so good, as I had read her Feather Crowns many years ago and found it merely ok. I would cheerfully recommend almost all of these books to just about anybody with the exception perhaps of The Vegetarian.

I gave three stars to these 37 books:

Lots of the family reads made this list. I hadn’t expected to like the Mistborn books as much as I did (and the third was kind of bad and thus got only two stars). Sri Lanka is well represented here in the books of Ondaatje and Cummings, thanks to recommendations from a colleague and friend. Africa makes a couple of appearances, largely because I so enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun (a rare five-star) last year and wanted to read a bit more from Africa (which, I know, is a very reductive thing to say). The Sellout was a big disappointment to me, enough so that I fear that the defect is in me as a reader and not in the book (it failed to connect for me in the way that a lot of Barth fails to connect; there’s something very smart about it but also something over-labored and thus tedious and annoying about it). Tartt delivers solid books consistently (two this year netted three stars for me and another four). I would recommend these books with less confidence. Some would surely land for some readers, but this cohort of books on the whole didn’t wow me.

I gave two stars to these eleven books:

The Erdrich was a real disappointment (I really liked The Round House), as was the Atwood, which I picked up randomly because it was on a table at a bookstore and I hadn’t read much Atwood and I was sort of feeling like maybe the U.S. was heading toward a Handmaid’s Tale-like future. My daughter liked Persepolis, and I was glad to learn more about Iran but didn’t really care for the book itself. The Stoddard and Wharton books were mostly just boring. Sanderson should have given up while he was ahead, and the Gratz was a real dud in my opinion after a more enjoyable first two books in that series.

I read but didn’t rate The Girl in the Well is Me by Karen Rivers because I’m very vaguely, tenuously acquainted with the author, and I feel weird about rating or commenting on books when I know the author (even though really I don’t — it’s a very very teensy, old connection, but enough of one that I feel weird about rating the book anyway).

Usually when I finish a book, I leave a very brief review on GoodReads, mostly just enough to tell a future forgetful me generally how I felt about a book or why I thought it was or wasn’t good. These micro-reviews aren’t really worth reading on the whole, but if you’re curious why a book landed in one pile or another and want to gamble on whether there’s useful context or not in my little review, click the link above and look for my review (easier to find if you friend me on GoodReads, I believe).

So, that’s 2016 in books for me. I’m glad I tried branching out. It was hard sometimes to avoid picking up a book by a white guy (there’s new Lethem, for example, and I got a book for my birthday that didn’t meet my criteria and has sat on my nightstand for 11 months), but I’m glad I mostly avoided it, and I’ll continue trying to keep an eye on how homogeneous my reading list is, and strive for heterogeneity. I think it’s probably more and more important to do so in a changing (or maybe merely acknowledged?) political climate in the U.S. that more than ever seems to favor the entitled and terrorize the rest.