My approach to books is to read the time-tested and to selectively sample the new. I suppose everyone does that. But last year was uncharacteristically bad. Through a very ordinary Demon Copperhead, a full-of-fluff Carlo Rovelli booklet, and an infuriatingly lazy Billionaire Raj, I suffered through a string of duds.
Thankfully, there are many great books out there. And rather than being depressed, I find it immensely reassuring that we'll die before reading all of them. Here's the best from last year.
1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Best book of the year. A classic, of course, and many in the U.S. and elsewhere have read it in college. In case you haven't, let me tell you it's a terrible idea to read the synopsis of the story. Take a leap of faith and plunge right in. You will not regret it. As a close friend said, "No book is good enough after Rebecca." While that may be an exaggeration, Rebecca is almost sure to be a highlight of your book-reading life.
2. Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb is a most interesting person. He is extremely intelligent, highly opinionated. He is very gracious generally, and he can be very vicious occasionally. He is probably one of the freest souls I've seen, unencumbered by peer effects or obligations or by a need to conform. Antifragile has a grand thesis -- anti-fragile things thrive in disorder, stress and chaos, and we should seek them, incorporate them into our lives. But that makes it sound very focused. It's not. The book is like a diary. Taleb's habit of rambling and running off tangents is left completely unshackled in Antifragile. There's no way to summarize it without omitting a lot of good stuff which is why it is emphatically not a book that could have been a blog post. And even if you don't agree with him, his erudition makes the experience of reading genuinely pleasurable.
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Yes, I know you've read it already. I have too. It's just that it was listed by The New York Times in the top three of best books of the 21st century, and I realized I hadn't read Bring up the Bodies but I couldn't really remember what happened in Wolf Hall and so I read it again. People have complained about the use of the third person limited present tense narration (that's what it's called) but I find that it makes the reader concentrate and drink in every word. It's also an interesting inversion of the roles Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More have been assigned in conventional history. More is traditionally the principled dissident and Cromwell is the unscrupulous and Machiavellian schemer. Cromwell is still that but he's also given a due (not sure if it's his due) as a capable, intelligent, and pragmatic man who is trying to survive and conquer a class-based world heavily stacked against him. More is sanctimonious, heartless, and cruel.
4. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
There's been a surge of books written by millennials that describe in many subtle and satisfying ways the millennial predicament, our anxieties, and also our struggle to find justice through mere words. The last bit is important. A lot of time in our conversations is spent in qualifying and clarifying our sentences, so as to make it painfully clear that we understand the injustice around us and that even our ability to articulate all this is an act of privilege that should be owned up. I truly believe a lot of this is genuine. But the main outcome of all this is a word spaghetti where we try to make sure our peers think we are "OK" but we hardly ever try to do anything that actually means anything or leads to any actual kind of sacrifice. It's all done to make ourselves feel less guilty. And what's more problematic is there is an unforgiving insular mentality which does not tolerate those who do not comply, a constant process of purification that is built on exclusion without recourse or opportunity to grow or to be allowed to return to the fold. It's a Squid Games world. Not that criminals (and I write this as Neil Gaiman's horrific actions come to light) deserve rehabilitation before commensurate punishment. But there is -- I don't think anyone can deny this -- a lot of in-fighting.
Birnam Wood is an activist collective of millennials (and younger) who are trying to save the planet by planting gardens in abandoned or neglected plots. They are led by a charismatic leader, Mira. Their world soon collides with that of Robert Lemoine, a billionaire with a dark past and present and who will do anything to get what he wants. It's when these worlds collides that Catton brings out the fragility of human ambition and human relationships into the fold, as the plot reaches its denouement in brilliant fashion. An extremely well written thriller with many profound moments. There are times when the reader discovers something about themselves, just by reading about how the characters think and act.
5. Pillars of Creation by Richard Panek
I am satisfied with my Goodreads review, and have nothing more to add.
If you, like me, have grown up reading books on physics, on cosmology and the Big Bang, you may have experienced, in more recent years, a sense of deja-vu. The new science books don't say anything new, they just rewrite the same old history of relativity vs quantum mechanics, some hand-waving about time, and then perhaps one chapter on new stuff. Don't get me wrong, physics is hard and progress is slow, I know that. But the book treatment doesn't seem to be the best way to convey this progress.
Which is why I found Pillars of Creation to be fantastic. Here's a book that reads like an extended Scientific American article on the history of recent discovery through the James Webb Telescope. And it does a brilliant job because it puts together both the thrill of success in getting an incredible feat of technology into space, and then the many bits and pieces of research being done through it. It's this smorgasbord of research topics that is so appealing. They touch on better understanding our solar system, studies of exoplanets, all the way to understanding how the universe evolved in its earliest (cosmologically speaking) époque. The first few chapters are about the telescope's history, now storied in the way it went above-budget and beyond any initial deadline. (A word of gratitude for deadline extensions!) Many mind-blowing details emerge in this fast-paced account -- planning for this telescope began before the Hubble project was even completed, for example!
Honorable mention to Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, a wacky, subversive story of a set of losers who carry sharp critiques of millennial society and then veer off into pathological deviancy that's a mix of shocking, disgusting and almost pitiful, ultimately making you question yourself and whether your agreeing with them (initially) made you complicit in their terrible end points.
Honorable mention to me for completing Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha, a book so dry it could consume all the moisturizer in the world and still be as parched as ever. Gandhi's life in South Africa is super interesting and one appreciates how greatness is chiseled day after painful day of struggle, failure, and jail time. But the cost of reading the book is too much. Guha is a terrible writer.
