Notes at the bottom.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert Caro | 1 (Dec. 28, 2018 - Feb. 8, 2019)
This was a book I actually started at the very tail end of December 2018, but I'm including it anyway because I didn't finish it until February earlier this year. This is an incredible book that I would recommend to anyone who considers themselves a connoisseur of great literature - a powerful story of a flawed individual taking on far too much power and wielding it as he saw fit for decades, at the expense of hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people and literally reshaping the coastline of New York City.
Not merely a biography of a single man, it is a biography of the shaping of city during that man's reign of power. And it is power that Caro is concerned with, specifically here how power is acquired and exercised within a democracy on a municipal level. Would it surprise you to learn that Moses never won an election? And yet.
It's a long read, and I dipped out of it many times - and this being cut down from Caro's original final version of 1,050,000 words down to 700,000. We can only hope that the original version will make it into print one day.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Jon Ronson | 3 (Jan. 2-3)
A marvelous book about the wacky world of the U.S. Army's explorations into the paranormal and its potential military applications - we may all be very, very happy that the paranormal, if indeed it does exist in any tangible, meaningful sense, can not be exploited militarily.
The book across its chapters leapfrogs from the 70s and 80s and their experiments over to post-9/11, when those discredited experiments were taken to the doctor and inspected closely to see if their kidneys could be used - an attempt to draw connections between the abuses of the War on Terror and those experiments. Finally it jumps backwards into the 1950s, talking to Eric Olson.
The Olson connection is one reason I picked up the book (besides the title and premise, of course) as Eric Olson was also the subject of Errol Morris' documentary series Wormwood, which I can not recommend highly enough. (Seriously, it's unbelievably excellent.)
It's a strange book, on a certain level delightful because of the wackiness of what it explores, and, for the very same reason it's delightful, it's also scary. You get a strange blend of hilarity and fear. Even if it doesn't fully succeed in linking up to present day, it's still a fantastic bit of writing.
(Yes, it was adapted, loosely, into a film. I haven't seen the film and have no plans to. It does not seem even remotely necessary to experience.)
A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression
Jane Ziegelman & Andrew Coe | 15 (Mar. 7-13)
Can the meal planning efforts of governments be considered even remotely interesting? On the basis of this book, yes, yes it can. It focuses on, well, the meal planning efforts of governments and not just governments but of popular magazines, the ways in which it was tried to figure out the minimum amount of sustenance a family could survive upon and how to distribute food to those who had no money to pay for it.
It's a far more interesting book then it has any right to be. It leaves one disappointed only in that it lacks either introduction nor conclusion, that one yearns for greater detail and depth and breadth, that, far from coming to a natural end, it seems simply to stop abruptly, and that it is not quite a culinary history so much as a social and dietary history.
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
Jonathan Coe | 18 (Mar. 14-20)
In the years since his death, Bryan Stanley Johnson, an experimental writer and poet who worked through the 60s and 70s and among whose works includes a book published in a box without binding aside from chapters marked First and Last which readers could assemble in any way they so chose, has fallen into obscurity relative to his heyday.
B.S. Johnson constantly questioned the nature of truth and and the way that fiction relates to it, grappling endlessly, to what to our eyes is an absurd extent, to how fiction can be made closer to truth, how narrative could be divorced from fiction to achieve that end, how to judge the 'truths' within other people's fictions.
Coe regards this with suitable importance: the relation of narrative and truth was a shaping fundament of Johnson's work, and so it is with Like a Fiery Elephant, within which Coe himself grapples with the nature of biography, of shaping the truth of life into a cohesive narrative, even though the act of doing so renders the truth of life - the enormous totality of the whole - more obscure. By acknowledging this outright - talking of his experience of Johnson, of being a novelist whose perceptions of the novel stand in opposition to Johnson's, of the ways in which a biography often must guess - and by way of the compassion he holds for his subject, he perhaps comes closer to the truth then a conventional biography might've.
And even if he doesn't, he still wrote a top-notch biography.
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
Alec Nevala-Lee | 19 (Mar. 16-19)
The author, Alec Nevala-Lee, has published a number of short fictions in various venues as well as novels and non-fiction articles. Astounding is his first non-fiction book, a group biography of a number of seminal figures of science fiction's so-called Golden Age, looking at the characters of these men who shaped science fiction and the ways in which they did so.
It's both engrossing and expansive, and stuffed to the brim with tidbits that will be entirely new. Not merely a fine work of science fiction history, it's a fine work of literary history. It is, in fact, probably the best historical work that science fiction has to its name, and we can only hope that it will serve as a call for others to take up the mantle with other popular genres, and with other eras of science fiction, and produce equally well-researched, engrossing histories.
(Typically, this is where the "Gee I sure hope he does more nonfiction stuff" bit would go. But I don't need to do that. He is. He's writing a biography of Buckminster Fuller. Permission to squee?)
Figuring
Maria Popova | 25 (Apr. 6-14)
This is a gorgeous book covering the lives of numerous women across centuries in fields that range from the scientific to the literary and those who occupy places in both, and the way in which their scientific and literary contributions emerged directly out of their - frequently heartbreaking - private lives. The way in which their lives weave in and out of each other, and the way themes recur across the centuries disconnected from one another, builds to a larger picture: what is a good life? is success, or love, enough for happiness?
Biography is blended with cultural criticism with sprinklings of history, all written in a style that is often poetic. It's a beautiful book that I expect fully to reward further rereading.
(A note on the weaving in and out. Many of these observations take the form of "X said Z, centuries later, Y wrote something similar to Z..." and this can become annoying. I encourage readers to look at this not as "Y acted under the preternatural influence of X" but as "Willikers, look at how stuff recurs over long periods of time!")
A Memory Called Empire | Teixcalaan #1
Arkady Martine | 39 (May 9-17)
A fantastic debut from a talented author, A Memory Called Empire has a strong linguistic component to it that, alongside its fascinating worldbuilding, lead me to fall in love with the world and with its leads. At core it's a murder mystery, through which small-scale character moments and politics weave themselves around. Watching Mahit navigate the unfamiliar world of Teixcalaan is a continual joy.
I look forward with no small eagerness to the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, not least because it means I will get to reread Memory.
Exhalation: Stories
Ted Chiang | 42 (May 18-21)
The occasion of a new Chiang collection is always a good time to go absolutely hog-insane, and this collection is filled with plenty of stories to justify the expression, stories of emotion and humanity that can only be told through a science-fictional premise. Every story is a finely-polished gem of both prose and characterization; prose that you almost never notice (and this is a great asset, believe it or not) and characterization that takes you far into a character's head.
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells | 55 (Jul. 25-28)
This was a compulsively terrifying read that I somehow could not stop myself from reading, even though it induced within me a sense of terrible fear, because, as the book lays out, not only have we abjectly failed to end global warming, more then half of the carbon that humanity has put into the atmosphere comes from the last three decades alone.
The current best-scenario is to keep warming to two degrees, and even with that, 135 million will die from air pollution - it's a baked-in, unchangeable fact - and even if we halt emissions instantly, that is still only a 1/20 chance. Wallace-Wells is not content to tell you how bad even the best-case scenario is, he goes further into what would happen at four, six, eight degrees of warming - hellish landscapes that are quite literally unimaginable.
For those of us who know something but not much really about climate change, Wallace-Wells also lays out the magnitude of the problem. It is an all-encompassing and expansive issue which exists on a terrible and global scale and extends out its fingers to every aspect of our lives. Not merely coastlines, it is drought, it is food supply, it is a massive and unending climate refugee crisis, it is the potential of ancient viruses released, new viruses evolved, and the possibility of bacteria within our own bodies rebelling, it is the equator rendered literally uninhabitable, it is trees sprouting in the Arctic.
And all in beautiful, lucid prose that, were we to take a step to another universe and hand this to our alternate selves, would make them sigh at its gorgeousness and delight at its inventiveness. Alas, it's all real.
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson | 58 (Aug. 9-13)
This was a very fun discovery, a book that purports itself to be a history of each room of the house, conducted by way of Bryson touring his own home individually and telling you its story. As living up to that remit goes, the book doesn't quite hit it - the house tour conceit doesn't quite cohere together, and I was lead to expect more of the actual history and developments of the rooms themselves, and a little less of the stuff that happened inside those rooms. It is also less a complete history and more a focus of the evolution of the room's uses during the 19th century, centered around 1851, when Bryson's home was built.
Instead, the book is an amusing tour through a variety of interesting, amusing, or both, stories of history that range from architecture to gardening to food and beyond. As a work of popular history, for a general audience, or for those who don't read with an excess of depth on many of the subjects touched upon, it is excellent, aided and abetted not just by the quality of the history but by Bryson's gift for explanation and for quippery.
Deadhouse Gates | Malazan Book of the Fallen #2
Steven Erikson | 63 (Sep. 1-17)
Every so often, the writer reads a book that makes you think, "wait, you can do that?" Deadhouse Gates was one such book, and that it was such a book was a surprise to me. Gardens of the Moon was enjoyable, but both my favorite characters got killed early on, and Memories of Ice was such a dull slog that I haven't managed to pick up book four.
Deadhouse Gates, however, was a masterpiece, chockful of exciting and fascinating characters. Some I preferred to others, but this was less a clean delineation so much as a gradient. It was, of course, Duiker's point-of-view and the Coltaine storyline that was so gripping and stunning. If I end up never reading another Malazan book, this will be the one I return to.
Cold Warriors: Writers That Waged the Literary Cold War
Duncan White | 73 (Oct. 3-13)
Across decades and continents, the author Duncan White links together in powerful intimacy and expansiveness the stories of five writers and a plethora of other, equally important writers, whose works of literature were utilized as weapons by the U.S. and the Soviet Union alike. It's a rich and rewarding read that brings to the attention many works of literature that have been forgotten, and beyond that, serves as an excellent example of telling history through the means of biography.
It is also a book that will broaden understanding of the Cold War. Beyond this, it is an excellent read in general, seeming more a thriller then a history, and yet the author still retains a grip upon the complexity of the Soviet ideology and of the complex inner worlds of the writers who serve as protagonists.
Steel Crow Saga
Paul Krueger | 76 (Oct. 17-25)
This wasn't even on my radar at all until a month or two before it was released - stuff like the author calling it an "epic fantasy of examination of colonialism through the lens of Pokemon." (Other descriptions were Pokemon meets Avatar: The Last Airbender and Pokemon meets Fullmetal Alchemist.) It's just the sort of wild description that instantly attracts me, and I ended up reading it - and enjoying it more then I expected it to.
For a book so suffused with colonialism, it's more fun then you could ever reasonably expect. It is set in the aftermath of revolution and its story follows the interlinking plots of four characters caught up in what I personally would call "winning the peace." This isn't set years or decades after revolution, it's set weeks and months afterward.
For all the comparative shtick that the book's been landed with, it's going to be obvious to any reader that Steel Crow Saga really doesn't line up with any of those, despite the obvious influences. (One fun thing to do as a reader is to find the references - I probably missed several.) I hope that readers who read it based on those taglines end up appreciating it on its own terms, because it's very good: thoughtful, introspective, with a couple rather sweet romances and some very anime battle scenes, with a delightful sprinkling of cheese and melodrama. And, what's more: it's fun.
Sontag: Her Life and Work
Benjamin Moser | 77 (Oct. 19-25)
One of my favorite kinds of books is the biography, and this one caught my eye after reading a review of it. I had also seen the name Sontag before in Errol Morris' book Believing is Seeing. For this biography, Moser utilized hundreds of interviews and Sontag's own private archives, and so created an unflinching look at Sontag that's nearly as hard on her as she herself was.
It's an excellent dive into both Sontag and her works, and if I could not so much as like Sontag, she is at the very least an interesting subject, and Moser lays her personality bare for us. Like all of us, Sontag was a person of contradictions. For a very long time, she was self-aware of those contradictions and flaws, although this did not ultimately lead to her taking the level of initiative and effort necessary to try and overcome them.
The Overstory
Richard Powers | 78 (Oct. 26 - Nov. 5)
This book is another example of a quirky description selling me instantly. I'll quote from Wikipedia:
The novel is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests.It is the most beautiful book I've read all year. Almost every one of the opening chapters in the Roots section - the only section subdivided into chapters - brought me to the edge of tears, and then managed to repeat the feat in the ending section. It's an exceptionally rare experience for a piece of fiction to reach into my heartstrings and play upon them so effectively, yet The Overstory did so regardless - and for that, it's probably my favorite book of the year.
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
Stephen Kinzer | 83 (Nov. 7-14)
Around the same time as the exposure of Watergate, there was another exposure, one of far greater importance and significance, and that was the exposure of COINTELPRO, a covert government program of infiltration, torture, and surveillance. One aspect of this, perhaps the best known aspect of it, is MK-ULTRA, long subject of novels and of conspiracy theories.
Would that it were a conspiracy theory. MK-ULTRA was a covert program with a specific mission to find out if a drug or technique existed that would allow the CIA to control the human mind, something that could be weaponized against the Communists, whom the CIA believed had already developed such a technique. MK-ULTRA ran from the 50s through the 60s, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, and was - in part - a continuation of torture experiments that had been conducted in Nazi and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
This biography, then, is in part a biography of Sidney Gottlieb and in part a biography pf the MK-ULTRA project. It's a horrifying read. Secret detention centers. Men drugged with LSD every day for over a year, told that it was "find a cure for schizophrenia." And it operated without supervision - his bosses did not ask, and Congress continually affirmed that they were happy with whatever information the CIA chose to provide them with. Deliberate ignorance.
Once again, you can blame Errol Morris for this one - Gottlieb was a pivotal player in the story of Eric Olson, which was told in Wormwood (and, on a smaller scale, The Men Who Stare at Goats) - and so when I was at the Library and saw the title of this book, I knew I had to read it.
Gideon the Ninth | Locked Tomb #1
Tamsyn Muir | 88 (Nov. 28 - Dec. 1)
Here is another book that, like Steel Crow Saga, had arguably misleading advertising and ended up a lot more fun then I expected. Advertising: "lesbian necromancers in space." While true, the lesbian aspects of the characters are simply another aspect of the story, compared to the main focus on "necromancers in space." This, again, may sound a little like critique, but it's meant as an observation.
Fun: my word was this a delightful book. Muir's prose is just gorgeous, evocative in its detail, with a feeling of timelessness, almost old-fashioned prose, really. The dialogue, however, is defiantly modern, and rather then switch prose style to match, she places that evocative prose alongside the dialogue and refuses to admit they don't belong together. It's a wonderful trick, sustained throughout the book, and by the end of it, it's not that they don't belong together and don't know it - it's that they do belong together and you didn't know it.
And again, this book is fun. It's one of those books with the intangible sense that the author enjoyed writing every word - which is an absurd notion that exists wholly within my own head, but even so. I ended up devouring this when I intended to digest it, and read it in four days flat. This, too, will be on the re-read list when the sequel arrives. (Not that it'll take long: sequel's coming out June 2, 2020.)
When the Great Days Come
Gardner Dozois | 95 (Dec. 16-25)
Having been able to - very quickly - read Being Gardner Dozois by way of a 30-day free trial on Scribd (I will soon be purchasing the book for my own collection), I was determined to read more of Dozois' fiction, especially as three short fictions of his had prior appeared in F&SF, of which I am a subscriber. So I checked out this collection of some of his work.
Reader, I was floored. The stories here were exceptional. The prose is beautiful and detailed, and there's no trace of stark minimalism here: paragraphs can get impressively lengthy. My favorite story was "Chains of the Sea," a tale of immaculate structure: we open with the arrival of the aliens - not first contact, just the landing of the ships; and then we switch over the perspective of a child named Tommy. Over the course of the novella, the connection between the two soon becomes obvious, and even though by the half-way point (or perhaps the 3/4ths point) I already had a suspicion how it would end, the crackling, kinetic energy of the prose kept me reading. My suspicion was correct. And that, let me tell you, did not remotely detract from it: the pleasure was in the execution, the prose, the inexorable inevitability with which the story built towards its conclusion.
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On the Year as a Whole:
I read an incredible number of books, more then I thought I could or would when the year started. I fully expected ~60 books, and instead I've reached nearly a hundred - this is, mind you, not counting books that were paused or DNF'd. It is also not counting books that I am reading currently and expect only to finish during the early days of 2020.
I also read across a reasonably broad spectrum: fantasy, science fiction, history, and biography, as well as somewhat stranger offshoots of straightforward history - A Square Meal being the primary example - and enjoyed most of everything that I read. A few books were DNF'd, a very small handful paused and picked up later. Some simply paused, with intent to pick up.
Some Thoughts as to Reading Next Year:
Reading so many books means that even some of my favorites get pushed out of my headspace, and that's a damn shame. I'm going to pick up a notebook, or something, and start taking notes alongside my reading: brief summaries of plot, thoughts on theme, etc. It's something that will force me to think, to remember, to be critical - and, therefore, I will enjoy my reading more, because it will be more informed reading.
There are some books that I read this year, and some that I've read prior, that I will be rereading: Ancestral Night, White Space #1, Elizabeth Bear; Gideon the Ninth, Locked Tomb #1, Tamsyn Muir; A Memory Called Empire, Teixcalaan #1, Arkady Martine; The Long Price Quartet, Daniel Abraham; The Years of Lyndon Johnson (series), Robert Caro; the Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake; and the Eternal Sky trilogy, Elizabeth Bear, among others.
There are over a hundred books I own that I have not yet read yet, some of which I have owned for more then three years. It's time to start trying to get through that pile. That way I can hopefully clear some space upon my horribly crowded bookshelves, because the mere act of purchasing a book is becoming an act with spatial, material consequences to my bookshelves. Probably time to start relying on the Library exclusively.
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