2020: My Year in Books
Typically I end my year with a blog entry about the books I have read in the previous 365 days. This year was an odd and trying year for me, as it was for everyone. Given the quarantine, I thought I might have read more than the usual number of books, but in fact, the opposite has been true. The pandemic has removed a lot of structure from my life, and I find that I often lose ground when I lack structure. Consistent habits make for better reading progress. There was nothing consistent or structured about being stuck at home without a schedule (other than work).
At any rate, here are the books I read last year, in order of completion:
The Things They Carried,Tim O’Brien
FIve Proofs of the Existence of God, Edward Feser
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Bullshit Jobs, David Graebner
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
Anti-Social, Andrew Marantz
Simple Christianity, N.T. Wright
The Natural, Bernard Malamud
The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
Letter to a Suffering Church, Robert Barron
Blood Meridian, Colmac McCarthy
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
The Old Testament, Amy-Jill Levine
The Great Influenza, John Barry
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nahisi Coates
The Reason for God, Timothy Keller
The Dictator’s Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquite and Alastair Smith
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus
Overstory, Richard Powers
The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter
Indistractable, Nir Eyal
How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers, Sarah Bakewell
Radicalized, Cory Dothrow
he Complete Prose Word of Alexandr Pushkin, Alexandr Pushkin
Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forester
Lessons from the Great Books, Rufus Fears
Renewing Hope, Bishop Robert Barron
The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Ethics 101, Brian Boone
The Sonnets of Shakespeare, Williams Shakespeare
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Notes:
This year many books left me disappointed. Many of these titles looked better on the shelves than they turned out to be. The biggest disappointments were:
The Miracle of Mindfulness, which was very uneven in its advice, and not detailed about meditation approaches. I have read many better books about meditation.
Anti-Social, a well-reviewed book that I wish I had never spend good money on. In the end, all the author could say about alt-right culture is, “Ain’t it bad?” Yeah, thanks. I like spending time learning what I already know.
The Last Lecture, very popular but I though amounted to “live your life, you never know when you will lose it!” I felt pathos of the author, who died, but his philosophy was skin deep.
Sapiens. Oh my God. Harari has got to get over himself. I try hard to avoid books in which the author thinks so much of himself that he becomes the topic. Be like me! I’m so incredible. Seriously, thanks for wasting my time and brain cells. I hate your book, chump.
Aspects of the Novel is a very famous book about writing style and criticism. Maybe it is just dated, but I found, other than Forester’s discussion of characterization, that it was not much use to me.
On the positive side:
Yes, War and Peace is good. It is worth the time and energy. Very long but easy to take in, and a tremendous scope. Tolstoy is one of the most penetrating thinkers about human psychology that ever has been.
Invisible Cities is great. If not the best book I read last year, it was close. Short, closer to poetry than prose, it is a dialog between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in which Polo describes all the magical cities he has been to in Khan’s kingdom. The cities described quickly leave the realm of reality, and the book becomes a series of fantasy poems about cities that have never been, but somehow exist in every human mind. Seriously, read it.
Sonnets of Shakespeare was a re-arrangement of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the order it is thought he wrote them. This, plus the notes, made the sonnets easier to understand. A very worthwhile way to look at William Shakespeare.
Also, David Graeber (#4) died last year, sometime after I finished his last book. May his soul rest in peace. I liked his book very much.
Happy New Year!
