My 2017 in Books

These are the books I read in 2017.

In total: 19 books, 6,663 pages.

Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The books in green are books started in 2016. The 3 books in tan (Cure, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Cartel) are books that I have not finished.

It is always hard to say what books were my favorite. The majority of these books are books that I would recommend, but I will highlight just a handful.

• 

  Sapolsky and a Baboon

  Robert Sapolsky is a primatologist and neurobiologist. He has spent 30+ summers in east Africa observing baboons as a primatologist while spending the school year as a professor and researcher studying the brain. Behave is a wide ranging book focused on why we do what we do. He looks at the intertwining of factors from neurochemistry to genetics, hormones, childhood experiences, evolutionary mechanisms, etc. As Sapolsky says, “it’s complicated – nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else.” But, it is still hella interesting. Oh, and the homunculus has no clothes.

• Another scientific book that I would recommend is The Upright Thinkers. Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist and author (writing frequently outside of his academic domain). Upright Thinkers is a big picture look at the history of science and scientific discovery. It reminded me of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Between the two, I enjoyed Bryson better (perhaps simply because I read it first or because of Bryson’s superior writing), but I would still recommend Upright Thinkers. The last third of the book stood out the most as it delves into physics (Mlodinow’s forte) and its scientific history.
• Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is still one of my favorite books. Homo Deus is the follow-on. From the book, “Once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. In the twenty-first century, …humankind will [seek] to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. We want the ability to re-engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but once we have it, who knows what else we might do with such ability?” Harari is a fascinating individual and an important thinker. I am not convinced that the world he outlines is where we are headed, but his book is filled with thought provoking futurisms.
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (surgeon, professor, staff writer at the New Yorker) is an important book and one that I would recommend to anyone who will die or knows someone who will die. It’s important.
• The best fiction book I read this year was The Hearts of Men. It is a story about growing up, families, relationships. The multi-generational story is told across 3 summers (1962, 1996, and 2019) where each summer’s tale centers around a teenage boy and Camp Chippewa, a Wisconsin Boy Scout Camp. The book is funny, touching, and filled with fantastic characters.

Below shows the number of pages in each of the 19 finished books. This totals 6,663 pages (average of 351).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 18 pages per day, but as you can see there is quite a swing. Some of these books were read in a continuous fashion; others were read in spurts.

Lastly, here are the Goodreads ratings along with my ratings. Goodreads allows a score of 0 to 5 (whole numbers only). Across the 19 books, I gave an average rating of 3.7 out of 5.

(Chart creation code can be found here.)