Books I Finished in 2017 (and a few I didn’t)

I know you’ve been waiting all year to see what books I managed to get through last year. I started about twice as many as I finished - I've included brief sketches of the more noteworthy ones at the end of this post.  About half of the books I finished were inspired by the Tim Ferriss podcast, and are denoted by **. Let me know your favorite reads, and if you read any of the books on this list, let me know in a comment what you thought of them. If nothing else, this may be the only place you'll see the term "bildungsroman" used twice in 14 pages, er, technically three times now.  So, in no particular order:

Akata Witch Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor is a science fiction author who hails from Nigeria, and thus has a different perspective on the future than we get from the European white guys who have owned this space from Day One (see what I did there?). I spent quite a bit of time with her works this year, and plan to spend more in 2018. It’s refreshing encounter a completely different voice (female, African) in speculative fiction - I’ve found that my perspectives have evolved from reading her work.

I already wrote an extensive review of Akata Witch , so I won’t say much here other than to say that this book is so much more interesting and sincere and meaningful than Harry Potter. If you have kids, get this for them, and then read it yourself. The sequel, Akata Warrior, came out a couple months ago, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I’ll let you know next year!

Lagoon - Nnedi Okorafor
What if aliens landed in Lagos, Nigeria instead of someplace in the US, as all the movies postulate? This is the premise of Lagoon, and he result is chaotic, hilarious, and poignant: A soldier, a rapper and a marine biologist struggle to keep Lagos from devouring itself as everyone struggles to fit the alien into their existing agenda. While on the surface this is a sci-fi novel, it is actually a novel about Nigerian people, culture and myth, and western society’s apparent inability to foresee the impact. Okorafor deftly uses the visiting alien as a metaphor for colonialism and globalization, and explores the mythic ramifications of extraterrestrial life. The alien also serves as a commentator on our myopic focus on profit-seeking at the expense of human compassion and the environment. The story is told with great compassion: we understand the motivations of the genocidal general and strongman president, as well as the poor beggars scam artists that plague all big cities. Lagoon opened my eyes to the plight of Africa, and the incredible contradictions and challenges as these cultures vault from tribalism directly into the media age.

Binti - Nnedi Okorafor
Binti: Home - Nnedi Okorafor
Spoiler Alert: I can’t really talk about Part 2 without giving away a bit about Book 1. Sorry!
Binti is the story of a sheltered young woman going into a very big world and eventually making her mark on it. The world expanded over the course of the first novel, as new worlds and characters were introduced. While most series continue to expand their universes by taking their protagonists to more and more new worlds, Binti: Home constricts the universe by taking us back to Binti's home village, where she must face the consequences of defying the social norms of her culture.

Binti: Home begins with Binti feeling guilty that she has not completed her tribal coming of age ceremony because she is attending school on a faraway planet. Members of the Himba tribe, especially female Himbi, don't go to school and they don't leave their village, and they certainly don't leave earth. Even though the university that Binti attends is a model of diversity, boasting students from dozens of species, Binti is the only Himba who has ever attended the school. She also feels isolated because of her notoriety, and it doesn't help that all of the humans in her class were killed in the first Binti novel - in fact, Okwu, her only friend, is one of the gas-breathing, tentacled aliens that slaughtered them, which only amplifies Binti's PTSD and general malaise.

Everyone hates Okwu, because until Binti negotiated a rapprochement, its species, the Meduse, had been in near-constant warfare with all the so-called civilized planets. The price of peace was for Binti to incorporate some Meduse DNA, including a tentacle that doesn't quite match her dreadlocks. Confused? So was I - read the books.

One thing you’ll notice in this series is that Ms. Okorafor makes gender identity interchangeable, arbitrary, temporary and ultimately unimportant, both in the way her aliens are constructed, and in the way her more “evolved” characters deal with it, for example, “She told me that even though she’d always been female, she’d been born physically male. Later, when she was 13, she’d had her body transitioned and reassigned to female”. Same goes for species: “Back at home almost every traveler was human. - here everyone was everything”. Binti’s universe celebrates and enables diversity in a way that Binti’s home culture cannot, and this tension propels much of the plot and poignancy of this series. I also like the fact that much of the technology in this series is organic. Spaceships are animals who have essentially agreed to carry passengers, trains are made of giant insect husks that float on slime secreted from giant plants. In Binti’s universe, it is possible to travel at speed without destroying other species and the environment to do so.

Catch up on this series soon, as Part 3, the Binti: The Night Masquerade, was released on January 16, 2018!

The Zap Gun - Philip K. Dick
I already reviewed this, too. In short, it’s vintage Dick, and a quick read.

Team Rodent : How Disney Devours the World - Carl Hiaasen
If you aren’t familiar with Carl Hiaasen, you probably should be. He usually writes mystery novels that are characterized by their biting satire, gallows humor, and off-color characters. However, Hiaasen started out as an investigative journalist, and has a special place in his heart for the Disney World conglomerate. He focuses his razor-sharp pen and wit at the Land of the Mouse in a well-researched, entertaining, and very concise rant against Disney’s invasion of Florida.

20th Century Boys (vol. 1-3) - Naoki Urasawa
I had recently finished Scott McCloud’s masterful Understanding Comics, and wanted to check out some manga. The title and topic caught my eye, so I started reading them. They were good, and I would have read more, but then I discovered that there are 22 volumes. That’s too much of a commitment. It’s a good story, though, and well illustrated. In a nutshell, a failed Japanese rocker finds that all of his childhood pals are dying or disappearing. He starts delving into his past for clues and discovers a vast conspiracy.

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang **
If you didn’t see Arrival, you should. In any case, you should read this book - it is probably the most original and diverse collection of short sci-fi I’ve read since William Gibson’s Burning Chrome. Chiang has published less than 2 dozen short stories in his 15-odd year writing career, but has won a bunch of awards, and with good reason. This is old-school speculative fiction: well-researched, magnificently written, backed by hard science. The eight stories in the collection run a vast range of topics, from mathematicians to aliens to biblical characters. What they have in common is soulfulness, compassion, and the ability to express the tragic frailty of humans and our aspirations against the enormity of the cosmos. Some of my more radical (and very talented) friends have criticised it as mainstream, watered down, and mawkish.  I say so what - if you read one book on this list, read this.

Albina and the Dog-Men - Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of my favorite filmmakers, authors and philosophers. I love his vision of this broken world and his ability to see the light in even the most despicable people. In Albina, Jodorowsky delves into the indigenous American mythos - especially Inca myths and Andean culture. Many of the themes: degradation, deformity, prostitution, isolation, and transcendance, are common to his other work, but are put in a new perspective. The basic premise reminded me of the dog scene at the beginning of his classic film, El Topo, but it goes much further -instead of merely men acting like dogs, impure lust transforms an entire townful of men into a pack of vicious dogs.

At it's heart, Albina is a retelling of the Parsifal myth for the Age of Kali. The two pure lovers must ward off lust, fanaticism and the elements in order to be united at last. With a twist, of course. Here are three quotes that caught my attention:
“Imagine that I am so strong that I can hold the whole world up in my arms, then let yourself fall, give in, stop giving, receive and receive and receive. Imagine that your mouth is Death and that my mouth is life, and swallow without stopping.”

“Now they found themselves thinking. Not only did they feel, but they were able to feel what they were feeling. A luminous region of their souls showed them the limits within which they were living and nothing in the world could be better than that realization. They felt themselves to be clay vessels carrying a jewel.”

“The thing I am not is more me than my emptiness.”
Although it’s softbound, the book is well-bound and printed, and features nice line illustrations by Francois Boucq that are somewhat reminiscent of Moebius’ work.

The First Rock 'n' Roll Bodyguard - Alf Weaver
Alf Weaver was the archetypal rock and roll bodyguard. He minded The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, The Monkees, Sinatra, Madonna - the list goes on and on. He started off as a boxer, then worked as a gofer for the Krays, which seems like how he started bouncing at trendy 60s nightclubs and hooking up with rock’s founding fathers. There’s a lot to be read between the lines here - now and then the violence and underworld backing of Swinging London peeks out, and it isn’t pretty. Great story, though - Old Alf oozes authenticity, and affords a unique look into some of your rock idols’ more sordid moments.

Night Watch: Book One - Sergey Lukyanenko
Day Watch: Book Two (Night Watch 2) - Sergey Lukyanenko
Twilight Watch: Book Three (Night Watch)- Sergey Lukyanenko
The Last Watch (Watch, Book 4) - Sergey Lukyanenko
New Watch: Book Five (Night Watch) - Sergey Lukyanenko
Sixth Watch (Night Watch) - Sergey Lukyanenko
Although only a few of his books have been published in English, and he is not well-known in the US, Sergey Lukyanenko is probably the greatest living Russian sci-fi author. These six novels make up the World of Watches cycle, and I found them simultaneously entertaining and revelatory. While they are essentially light fantasy/horror reading, there is a great deal of Russian cultural references, and I found myself going down a lot of Wikipedia and YouTube rabbit holes in search of context, and I feel like I wound up understanding Russian popular culture as a result.

You may have seen the amazing and highly recommended movie Night Watch or its sequel Day Watch. It takes place in Moscow, and the premise is original: the world contains Others, people with special abilities. Most of them have a choice whether to follow the light or the darkness, and each person must make the decision themself. The forces of Night and Day have made an uneasy truce and police each other to make sure that neither side gains the upper hand. The bickering and maneuvering between the various wizards, vampires, werewolves and psychics and shapeshifters are reminiscent of the 2017 US Congress.
What really hooked me on this series, though, were the countless references to Russian pop culture. This series affords a unique look into the Russian soul, their combination of brutality and incredible sensitivity.I also discovered a ton of great bands like Piknik, Matrixxx and Gleb Samoylov, and interesting cultural figures like Vladimir Vysosky . I built a Youtube playlist of my favorites here.  Even if post-modern Russian vampires don't tickle your fancy, give some of the music a try.

• Hack College Like an Entrepreneur: 40 Surprising Insights from the World's Top Founders - Antonia Liu
• I'm proud to say that I bought the very first print copy of this book!  Antonia has compiled advice from the world of entrepreneurs and self-help gurus and applied their core principles to succeeding in college.  She applies the 80/20 rule, positive thinking, goal-setting, and many other practices to getting the most out of the University experience while minimizing effort.  A must- read for anyone with kids or friends who are enrolled, or thinking about enrolling, in college.  I have been working to adapt some of the concepts to my middle-school aged student, with some success.
• Oh, and I'm even applying some of them to my own life!

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing - Marie Kondo **
Marie Kondo is the Japanese celebrity tidying up guru. She’s kind of compulsive. Very compulsive, actually. But if you go through her method of sorting and consolidating all of your stuff, then piling ait all up in the middle of the floor, then asking yourself out loud, “Does this thing really bring me joy?”, you’ll find that the answer is no at least 50% of the time. Then chuck it. And fold your clothes her way, because it saves a ton of space and makes it easy to find stuff.

Again, she’s just a teeeeeeeeeny bit OCD: your socks protect your feet all day, so you shouldn’t ball them up or stretch their elastics. She injects a form of animism into belongings that is simultaneously primal, charming and completely freaky. Check her out. Her podcast on the Tim Ferriss Show  is also very interesting.

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead - Brene Brown **
Brene Brown makes a compelling case in this well-written and inspiring book that courage doesn’t actually exist as a thing in and of itself. She proposes that most people who do courageous things (or anything exceptional, for that matter, do them because they aren’t afraid to be vulnerable. You can interpret “vulnerability” differently - depending on context, it can be the willingness to appear foolish, or the ability to express emotion when it may not be reciprocated by the object of your emotion. It could be going ahead with something in spite of the possibility of failure, or creating something that not everyone will appreciate. No matter what what it is, anytime you do anything, you create anything, you change anything, any time you reach out of your comfort zone, you expose yourself to ridicule or failure, or silence (which is sometimes the worst of all), and it takes courage to make that first move. It could be asking someone you like out on a date, or applying for a job, or writing a book review. Don’t be afraid, and try not to place too much value on what people think about what you do. The more you stick your neck out, the more you’ll realize that the fear of consequence is usually much greater than the consequence itself, if it even happens.

Another takeaway is her definition of shame versus guilt. Shame is the feeling that you yourself are inherently bad, guilt is the feeling that you did something bad. Guilt allows for redemption and can move us along the path to becoming the person we want to be. We wallow in shame and it is strongly correlated with negative behaviors like addiction, violence, depression, etc. We can overcome our feelings of shame by allowing ourselves to make mistakes and accepting our mistakes, then letting go of them. You could call this practice….

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha - Tara Brach **
I have mixed feelings about this book. It operates on a couple different levels. It is the story of one woman’s quest for spiritual meaning and her discovery and practice of Buddhism. It’s also a very practical guide to integrating Buddhist thought and practice into your daily life. It begins with the idea of “radical acceptance”, which is trying not to categorize the things that life throws at you as good or bad, happy or tragic, joyful or painful, but rather to examine them and try to analyze how they make you feel and then try to get to the root of why you feel that particular way.

Ms. Brach posits that most of our painful feelings come from a sense of unworthiness, and that most of our interactions and most of our conflicts, inner and with others, stem from the fear that we will not measure up. We can use meditation as a tool to get to this basic feeling of unworthiness or shame, and get to a place of accepting ourselves as we are. It is only when you truly see and accept yourself as you are now that you can build yourself into the person you want to become.

Tara Brach is a True Believer, and there are sections of this book that are pretty cultish. She can also be bit too new-agey, hippy-dippy for my taste. That said, I read it right after Daring Greatly, and it was a perfect counterbalance Brene Brown’s very practical and secular book.

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging - Sebastian Junger **
Tribe opens with Benjamin Franklin’s observation that civilized people would often run away to live with native Americans, but almost never the other way around. Why was this? Junger suggests that it’s because of the culture of personal honor, loyalty and shared purpose that tribal societies have. Why do people, mainly men, thrive under extreme stress such as war, yet have so much trouble readjusting to modern society?

According to Junger, the trouble isn’t with the “sufferers” of post-traumatic stress disorder, it is with society itself. We never encounter violence, we never even see how our food is killed, and it’s hard for us to accept individuals who have, because they represent the animus of our society, something we don’t really want to let into our tidy world of consumerism and self-indulgence. The men and women who return from war have seen their comrades sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the team, and have killed people just like themselves, and watched people’s loved ones - who are exactly like their own loved ones - die in horrible ways. All in the name of defending our society, our values, and our way of life. Yet our way of life isn’t really that defensible. Most of the things that matter to us don’t really matter that much when bullets are flying around your head and your friends are getting hit.

Tribe suggests that one of the reasons our society currently lacks cohesion and civility is because we do not have a shared sense of purpose and investment in the culture itself. Junger quotes a graffito in Iraq that sums up the disconnect quite nicely: “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the mall.” He points out that societies with mandatory military service tend to be more cohesive and have higher “happiness rankings”, and proposes that the US introduce some form of mandatory national service to create a common experience for all citizens and to help make everyone feel more invested in our country.

There is an element of bro-ishness about all this that I find discomforting, and I morally object to the notion that our society needs to become more militaristic and regimented in order for us to be civil and happy. However, his positions are eloquently stated and well-supported by both empirical and anecdotal evidence, and it is a quick and interesting read.

Islands in the Net - Bruce Sterling
Along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, Islands in the Net is one of the quintessential cyberpunk novels of the late 1980s. I read it back then and really enjoyed it, and have often found myself thinking I recognized some of its themes in the headline news over the years, so I decided to re-read it. I found it to be as prophetic as I remembered it, along with some spectacular misses and misjudgements. The story takes place around 2023, a mere 5 years from now and I was curious to see how close Sterlings predictions were around technology and geopolitics.

On a superficial level, Islands in the Net is the story of a woman’s quest to find her identity. It contains a lot of male stereotypes and projections that you wouldn’t see in a novel written in today’s PC and super-sensitive world, but I think that, especially when you consider that this book was written thirty years ago, Sterling did a pretty good job creating a multi-dimensional female character and chronicling her journey to self-awareness, fulfillment, and ultimately self-realization and personal power.

Laura Webster runs a guesthouse/executive retreat for Rizome, a global pharmaceutical corporation. Sterling nails the “big corp as family” trend - Rizome takes care of its employees from cradle to grave, discourages outside friendships and activities, and so on.

Most of the developed world is neatly run as a sort of corporate democracy and tech is highly regulated. However, several “failed states” and “developing countries” such as Grenada, Singapore, and Mali, are developing rogue tech that could upset the balance of power and the big corporations’ monopoly on technology. These “islands in the net” are essentially off-limits to citizens of the civilized world, and are writing their own futures in the resulting vacuum. Sterling gets disruptive tech right: early on, Laura’s husband David notices that everyone in Grenada has black skin, even though they don’t have african hair or features. It turns out that it’s because of a sunscreen that works by activating the melanin in skin cells, essentially turning everyone black. It’s disruptive on two levels: first, because you only have to use it once, so it breaks the classic consumerist buy-use-dispose-buy profit model, but also because it abolishes racism by making everyone the same color.
True to real life, the banks are profiting by taking money and making a profit from all sides.

The Internet of Things, the iWatch, and the Quantified Self are all there: Laura has a personal metrics app for timing her runs and sending the data to her watch phone. Trash cans come when you ask them to - I think this is called “ubiquity” nowadays.

There was one quote that had me rolling on the floor, though: “...he zipped through it at 2400 baud his fat shrouded eyes devouring whole paragraphs at once.”. What? That is 2400 bits per second. My crummy internet connection runs at 200 Million bits per second. So in Sterling’s 2023, the internet is 8,000 times slower than it is in our 2018. Email was still the killer app back in 1988, and nobody could imagine how fast the internet could get, or how much cool stuff (and not so cool stuff) we’d want to send over it.

In the political arena, Sterling’s Singapore, with its charismatic dictator and groupthink single party totalitarian system, is very similar of today’s North Korea. Grenada has found a way to digitize Voudon to defend its systems and attack its enemies. Sadly, Subsaharan Africa may be even more of a mess in real life than Sterling predicted. The rogue states and criminal organizations use flying drones to eavesdrop on and assassinate enemies. Sound familiar?

In short, I found Islands in the Net to be a great adventure story/bildungsroman against a high-tech background. Even though portions of Sterling’s tech predictions were laughably off-base, I think it’s still relevant, and more important, fun. Inexplicitly, this crucial volume in the cyberpunk canon appears to be out of print at the moment, but there are lots of cheap vintage paperbacks out there - for now. Snag yours soon!

The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling
I don’t think there’s any shame in not knowing that caryatids are architectural columns that are shaped like women, and the reason Bruce Sterling chose that title doesn’t become apparent until the very end of this 2009 novel. As I alluded in my previous review, I hadn’t read any of Bruce’s work for many, many years, but I grabbed it on a whim when I saw it at the library. It turns out that Sterling has gotten better with age: although I love his earlier novels, Caryatids is a much more mature work than his 80s books like Islands in the Net and Schismatrix. He has a knack for describing fictional and very complex technology in a way that sounds natural. Anyone who has read classic sci-fi knows whereof I speak: paragraphs of background information on how reverse embolic tractor beams work and lengthy dissertation on how the 3rd Empire of HubbaBubba collapsed on Arcturus. Somehow, Sterling can fill in all this background material in the normal course of telling a story, without digression. It is a rare and welcome gift in speculative fiction.

The Caryatids’ setting and storyline are rather involved, but in brief, there is a Balkan war criminal who has been imprisoned in a space station. She created 7 clones of herself as part of her complicated world domination plan. They are scattered around the globe, which got seriously destabilized by a big war followed by rising sea levels. China is the only real nation-state left, and there are two "civil society groups", the Dispensation, who are green capitalists who are mostly into entertainment. They believe that supply-side economics will do more to save the planet than sacrifice and heroics. “The Dispensation was a military-entertainment complex, it always had to throw its marked cards into the magician's hat, its disappearing rabbits, its custard pies…” The second group, the Aquis, are visionary technophile makers racing to invent and deploy radical solutions to the environmental crisis. “There was a melange of potent forces best described as “futurity”. They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.”  Both groups mistrust one another, but the conflict is largely philosophical, and each society is a utopia of sorts.

However, mama’s world domination plan is still in effect, and is about to shift gears. A great story ensues. Sterling is a good writer technically, and he invents very original futures in such detail as to make everything cohesive and plausible. His characters are believable and generally sympathetic. And most important, all of his works, but especially The Caryatids, have a basic optimism and faith in humanity that is sadly lacking in most imagined futures.

Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form - Scott McCloud
While not as good as his incredible and eye-opening Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics talks about the future of comics in the digital age in comic form, of course. It covers how to distribute them, how to utilize digital technology to make something more interactive, and how to compensate the people who create them. It goes into a lot of detail about how the internet and computers have transformed comics from essentially hand-drawn art to mixed media, where many artists draw their frames directly on a tablet and import them into a computer, then scan or import other graphics and use something like Photoshop to create basically a digital collage. Since it came out in 2000, it’s getting a bit dated, but it’s remarkable how little has changed in spite of new technology. A prescient book that is really about how technology is transforming the way artists make and sell art.

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) - Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson **
Another recommendation by one of Tim Ferriss' guests, I found this to be a really useful book. It's really about cognitive dissonance; which is a fancy word for humans insisting they are right even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Mistakes begins by digging into some of the better known forms of cognitive dissonance such as confirmation bias which is when you make a decision and then mentally skew all the evidence to point to the rightness of your decision.  An example of this is the myth that you don't need an education to be wildly successful.  There are always anecdotal stories of this or that entrepreneur or inventor or whatnot who dropped out of college, then founded Facebook, or Microsoft, or whatever.  First off, this is telling the story in reverse - I'm sure it wasn't obvious that Bill Gates would wind up ruling the world at the moment he dropped out of school - not even to Bill himself.  But in hindsight, we are able to thread a narrative of daring and rebellion and success that we love to hear.  We don't hear about Bill's classmate, who also dropped out of school and is delivering pizzas.  A much larger proportion of wildly successful people, like Warren Buffett, finished college, but that fact isn't interesting, so it only takes up half a sentence in Buffett's bio.
They go deeply into the psychology of self-deception and self-justification.  According to them, everyone sees herself as a fundamentally good person, so we tend to "unremember" our unkindnesses, mistakes and failures. When we can't erase them, we come up with convoluted ways to justify our behavior:

• They did it first
• Everyone else was doing it
• I didn't know

The authors drill down into one area that hits close to home:  The Satan Scare of the late 1980s.  You may remember all the headlines about young children reporting horrific satanic abuse at daycare centers around the country.  There were black masses, ritual sacrifices, children baked into cakes and eaten in cannibalistic orgies.  The people who operated and worked at these centers were taken to court and vilified in the press.  Then, one by one, it turned out that the way that the psychologists who interviewed the children had essentially "led" the witnesses, and that none of that crazy satanic stuff happened.  The daycare staff were vindicated, but it was too late for many of them - they had lost their businesses, been forced to move out of their communities, broken marriages, and so on, all because a few psychiatrists and social workers did sloppy investigations.  And to this day, many of them have yet to admit publicly that their methods were flawed.

One of the takeaways for me was that memory is essentially a story, and that it is part of human nature to ignore parts of our history and embellish the more flattering parts. We have an innate need to be right, so a lot of our processing power goes into proving ourselves right.  It may just be the way we are wired, but those of us who want to do the truly "right" thing, and to be kind, compassionate humans must force ourselves to look at things from multiple angles.  One way to do this is to keep a decision diary and review it to check for confirmation bias.  Get in the habit of publicly admitting mistakes.  Try not to be afraid to change your mind (this is becoming popularized as "pivoting"). But most of all, reflect upon the consequences and potential victims of your positions and decisions, and weigh your words carefully before you commit them.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman **
People have been telling me to read this book for decades, and I finally got around to it. Richard Feynman was a physicist, and was irreverent, outspoken, brilliant, and, to be honest, a bit roguish. In this autobiography, he talks about his life and reveals some of his eccentricities. My favorite anecdote took place when he was at Los Alamos and they were getting ready to test the first nuclear bomb. They gave everyone dark glasses so the blast wouldn’t blind them, and all the other physicists dutifully put them on and therefore couldn’t see anything when the blast took place. Feynman thought it through and realized that the danger of being blinded came from the ultraviolet light and that UV wouldn’t go through a car window, so he wound up being one of only two people who actually saw the first atomic blast with their naked eyes. So what’s amazing is that these weren’t just any physicists, these were the best physicists in the world - people like Oppenheimer and Edward Teller - and apparently none of them thought it through and realized that they didn’t need the glasses. That, in a nutshell, is what made Feynman different. Read the book.

Mating in Captivity - Ester Perel **
This is a groundbreaking book on relationships. Ms. Perel looks at why so many relationships fail, and questions whether all of us are wired for monogamy, and why most of us still crave and seek committed one-on-one relationships, even though most are doomed to failure. She discusses ways to improve our monogamous relationships (spoiler alert: it mostly boils down to understanding what you want from the relationship, and making it clear from the get-go what you are willing to put into - and sacrifice for - the relationship). Her basic thesis is that modern culture pressures people to expect too much from their partner, and that no single person can be your best friend, a pornstar lover, your confidante, business partner, and so on. She suggests that we have to narrow our expectations a bit, and seek fulfillment in some areas from others. She thinks that most of us over communicate with our partners - they don’t really want to know how we feel about everything, and that a very large part of our attraction to others is that sense of mystery, and that, although it goes against conventional wisdom, maintaining that sense of mystery in our relationships will strengthen them.

She is a very good writer, as well - you will find this book entertaining as well as informative.

My Absolute Darling - Gabriel Tallent
Thanks to Bronwyn Bonney for tipping me this one. Tallent has talent - I bet nobody ever made that quip before! His prose is exquisite: he has the deep texture and verbal nuance of a Cormac McCarthy, who I’m sure is an influence, but he also writes strong, believable dialogue. At its heart, this is a book about the way we bully and ostracize one another and how we turn our own pain around and inflict it on others. And how it’s possible to end that cycle.

This is a novel about Turtle, a young woman who has been sexually and emotionally abused, but somehow, in spite of her submission to this abuse, she has maintained an inner strength. In some ways, Turtle’s self-defined fear and hesitation are a reflection of everyone around her. Everyone knows that something isn’t right, but nobody wants to get involved, so they all have a certain amount of responsibility for whatever tragedy ensues.

I feel I can best convey the brilliance and mood of this book by sharing some quotes:

Tallent offers us a slightly more visceral version of the “Fail Fast, Fail Forward” motto:
“…(Am I) afraid to fail and for that reason, too afraid to try? Is it strange that they would see the same thing in me, my hesitation, my paralyzing self-doubt? She thinks, you are bound to make mistakes, and if you are unwilling to make mistakes you will forever be held hostage to the beginning of a thing, you have to stop being afraid, Turtle. You have to get in the practice of being swift and deliberate, or one day, hesitation will f*** you.”

"When [she] knows something’s name, she thinks she knows everything about it and she stops looking at it. Buth there is nothing in a name, and to say you know a thing’s name is to say that you know nothing, less than noting. … “Don’t ever think the name is the thing, because there is only the thing itself and the names are just tricks, just tricks to help you remember them.” …You keep on like that, looking as if you didn’t know, looking to find out what it is, really."

Tallent is a mountain climber, and you can tell. He knows what it’s like to be on the edge of life and letting go, and the strength it takes to keep going.

“You reach a point where the next pull-up hurts so bad. ...Because holding steady is-is-There is this bad, really bad, sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty so painful, so asshole-clenching, that it becomes - It’s an awful thing to say, but it’s easier to let go and be split in fucking half than it is to try and hold on, suffering and not knowing what is going to happen. That’s courage. Taking your own fucking life in your own fucking hands when that is the hardest thing you can do. No one thinks of it. Everybody think they’d do the right thing, but that’s not true. They don’t understand how scary it is. How hard it is. No one understands unless they’ve been there. We’re there now, and you’re gonna do the right thing despite the fear and despite the hurt.”

The book reveals the depths of self-hatred, when we do things we don’t want to do, over and over, until we realize that to continue is death.

“I don’t think anyone knows why they do things. They just think they know it.”
“Really?”
“It isn’t until things get hard and you see yourself doing the wrong things.”

Like any good Bildungsroman, it is ultimately about coming of age and reclaiming one’s self and having the guts to do the right thing.
"If I go back… there will be a whole tract of myself that I will have to keep half lit by remembering, and I will never come to peace with it, but if I go in there now and just do the best that I can, that is a story I can tell myself, however it ends. More than anything, more than life itself she wants her dignity back. She thinks, okay… put your brain in your lunchbox and go to work."

There are lots and lots of incredible quotes in Absolute Darling about perseverance and resilience and self-knowledge, and the plot is horrifying, graphic, and very disturbing.

My only criticism of this book is that, like so many contemporary novels and films, the violence is so exaggerated and stylized that it approaches parody at some point. Without giving away the story, several of the characters in the story walk away from wounds that would kill or cripple any mortal human, then go on to perform superhuman feats. I feel that this stylization of violence feeds the perception that people can take a bullet or be hit by a car and survive, which is a very cartoonish way of looking at violence, and perhaps contributes to the perpetuation of violence, especially gun violence, in our culture. But you’ll forget all about that when you get sucked into this genuinely great first novel. If Gabriel doesn’t kill himself on one of his climbing expeditions, he’s going to become one of our great authors.

On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Believe it or not, I was the quintessential Beat novel for the first time this year, when I found a bunch of Kerouac novels in a dumpster near my house. It’s ironic, because I was a big fan of Beat literature in general, and Kerouac in particular, and read several of his other novels, plus a couple of bios when I was in my teens. Inspired by Kerouac, I went on several hitchhiking trips around that time, none of which were anywhere near as successful, let alone epic, as the trips that Kerouac chronicled in On the Road. I also got to talk Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, both of whom are characters in the novel, at some length on a couple of occasions, and I remember some of the Denver places featured in OTR. All this makes me feel quite close to the events mythologised in On the Road.

It was an interesting experience to read this later in my life, when I could reflect on how much this book meant to me in my youth and contrast that nostalgia with the feelings the book evokes in me now. In retrospect, Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s real-life idol, the real hero of the book, and the seminal beat/hippie figure, is kind of despicable. He’s a misogynistic drifter who seems incapable of forming personal relationships. He constantly mooches off his friends, and consistently leaves his friends, lovers and wives holding his bags. He talks incessantly and has an insane yet incomprehensibly contagious restlessness that either inspired or repulsed nearly everyone he encountered in his life. In one scene, Jack and Neal are staying at someone’s house, and Neil breaks a teenage girl’s “hillbilly” record, so Jack tells her to break Neal’s jazz record. It is only when his prized record is broken that he has any empathy for the girl at all, and then only for a moment.

I expected to pick up On the Road and read a few chapters at most, but Jack and Neal reeled me in again, after all these years. OTR reminded me of an America not long ago where people would pick up hitchhikers, or give a stranger a meal, or see a bunch of people on drugs and never imagine that a person would take drugs. Of a Mexico where two gringos could drive from Laredo, Texas to Mexico City at 80 miles an hour and the only real danger would be that the people wouldn’t let you leave their adobe village because they were wining and dining you so hard. But you can see the dark underbelly between the cracks. The cops will work you over at a moment’s notice. Racism is pervasive and blacks and whites alike are astounded that Jack and Neal go to the black clubs to see jazz shows.

OTR also reminded me of a younger me, who was still captivated by the myth of the Road, of rootlessness and motion and drugs and girls and the incredibly close bonds that can form between fellow travelers. I still have mixed feelings about that time and what it means - sometimes I wish I could go back, and sometimes I wish I’d never been. Probably similar to how Jack felt later in his life, too.

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
I was on a beat roll, so decided to read another classic that I’d never gotten around to. Another story of a caddish man who loses a good woman by chasing one-night stands. The cad, Port Moresby, is the quintessential hipster. He sees himself as a traveler rather than a tourist, although he seems eager to see all the attractions. Mercifully, Port dies about midway through the novel, leaving his wife, Jane, to fight her way out of the desert. Maybe I wasn’t reading deeply enough, but I don’t fully grasp why this novel gets such rave reviews.

 Like many novels by men that feature female protagonists, I didn’t think Bowles did a very good job getting into Jane’s psyche, and maybe it happened back in the 40s, but I found the idea of Jane being abducted and put in a harem rather implausible. In short, the book held my attention, but I didn’t like the story much, or find the characters that compelling - I honestly don’t understand what all the hoopla is about this book. There was one quote that stuck out: “Women always think of what is finished instead of what is beginning. Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you’re climbing. It makes you sick.” However, I don’t think that quote applies just to women.

I sold Andy Warhol (too soon) - Richard Polsky
I saw this one in a thrift store, and it just looked interesting. I was not disappointed. It covers the same period as Steve Martin’s excellent novel An Object of Beauty, so I thought I’d read it for deeper insight into the art boom of the early 1990s.

Richard Polsky is a modern art dealer based in LA, who specializes in Andy Warhol. He has managed to purchase one of Warhol’s Frightwig paintings (the purchase is the subject of his earlier I Bought Andy Warhol), and his acquisitive (soon-to-be-ex) wife pressures him to sell it. It seems like a no-brainer. It’s 2005, and prices for modern art have never been higher. Every boom is followed by a bust, and Polsky can’t afford to be left holding the bag. He sells his piece for an astonishing $450K, then watches in horror and disbelief as similar pieces begin selling in the millions.

Meanwhile, one of his clients decides he wants to buy a Frightwig for his collection. The rest of the book is about Polsky’s search for another Frightwig. His quest takes several years and he traverses the country in search of the illusive painting. During his travels, we meet many of the people in the world of high art: high-flying collectors who seek to corner the market, and thus control the prices, of certain artists, arrogant dealers, and the artists themselves.

Polsky has been in the business for decades and knows almost everyone in the art world, and his stories reveal a lot about the personalities and market dynamics that drive it.

Books I Couldn’t Finish (and here’s why)

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
After devouring the brilliant and mind-blowing Sapiens in 2016, I was really looking forward to this sequel, which turned out to be mostly rehash, in my opinion. The first half of the book was essentially and condensed version of its predecessor, and the second half expanded upon on the last couple of chapters without any real revelations. Homo disappointed me, because I felt that it lacked the wit, vision, and scope of Sapiens. I hope Harari puts a little more time and thought into his next book, because he is a solid scholar and has a unique ability to make very insightful generalizations about complex subjects in language that can be understood by the general reader.


Tools of Titans - Tim Ferriss **
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve turned into a Timmite (Ferrissian?). Reading his books and listening to his podcasts has inspired me to change my life in myriad ways, including losing 30 lbs and quitting smoking. I’ve listened to every one of his nearly 300 podcasts, and have found them immensely entertaining and inspiring. I’ve taken away at least 2 great quotes and one actionable item (book, movie, practice, habit) from every. Since this 700-page (count ‘em) tome consists of excerpts from his podcast interviews, nothing really came across as that new. Interestingly, a lot of the quotes I found the most inspiring were apparently not as inspiring to Tim, as he didn’t include them!

Nonetheless, if I were to do over, I would seriously consider just getting the book rather than listen to more than 600 hours of interviews, even at the risk of missing many gems.

Tribe of Mentors - Tim Ferriss **
This is all original material, but I simply haven’t had time to read it all yet. So far, there is a lot of great advice on how to keep going when the world isn’t spinning your way, how to turn failure into success, and general advice from absurdly successful people in all different categories, from sports to venture capital, acting, music, and on and on. While all of the people in here are pretty traditional (ie, he doesn’t interview Henry Rollins, but probably should), it turns out they have some pretty radical ways of solving problems. Go to a bookstore (assuming there still is one where you live), and read 10 pages at random. If they seem worthwhile, buy the book. If you want to change your outlook and life for the better in 2018, you won’t be disappointed.
I have to share this with you: Steve Case, founder of AOL had a hilarious, albeit somewhat cruel, comment when Tim was interviewing him. "How do ya get people to give you 90% of the content for your books, then you just type it up, throw in a couple of intros, and off to the press?" Even so, it's pretty amazing that Tim was able to publish more than 1000 pages in 2017. Hats off.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
- Kevin Kelly **
Kevin Kelly was one of the founders of Wired Magazine, and is one of those rare authorities who has both vision of and influence on the future of technology. I got a lot out of 2010’s What Technology Wants, which described our relationship with tech, and how “disruptive” technology like the telephone and radio, were gradually tamed, regulated, and to an extent, co-opted, in order to achieve ubiquity. This book seemed like a good bet - tech maven calls out 12 megatrends - and it may be, but after 3 tries, I just wasn’t able to get past the second Force. It’s well written, and the subject matter was interesting and to an extent new, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care. I’ll keep trying, because Kelly knows what he’s talking about, because he's right more often than he's wrong: ignore him at your peril.

The Artist’s Way - Julia Cameron **
This is a classic, and it’s been repeatedly recommended to me, so I decided to read it. I didn’t realize that it’s actually a 12-week program. I’m about 3 weeks into it, but it’s a big commitment, with a lot of writing and exercises which are hard for me to do on a consistent basis due to my other commitments (guitar, meditation, work, kids, exercise, cold exposure, general home upkeep, other reading). What I have done, though, is to do the “Artist Pages” which is to write 3 pages first thing every morning no matter what, and that in itself, has been a very positive experience. I’ve also been making an effort to take myself on an “artist’s date” at least once a week, where I do something alone just for me - see a movie, go to a museum, etc. This, too has been really inspiring. I intend to keep plugging at the 12 week thing, though I suspect at this rate, it’ll take more like 26.

If you made it this far, and I've piqued your interest in a book or two, please consider purchasing then through the links I've provided.  I get a small cut, and you get the same price on Amazon!