My 2019 in Books

These are the books I read in 2019.

Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (21 Lessons) was started in 2018. The 3 books in tan are books that I have not finished.

There are definitely some good ones in there I would recommend. Here are a hew highlights.

• Bill Bryson is an absolute gift. The Body is similar to A Short History of Nearly Everything in that both are long and enjoyable walks through fascinating topics. While Short History is a look at scientific discovery in general (physics, biology, astronomy, etc), The Body is obviously more narrow in focus. With humor and wit, Bryon overviews every edifice and orifice of the body and talks about what we know and how we know it. The book was packed with interesting information and was never dry.
• I need to read more Jon Ronson. The Psychopath Test was the first Ronson book I have read. It was quite enjoyable. His style is something else – hilarious, irreverent, erratic. And it works. This book is a look at the “madness industry.” One of the stories he tells is about a guy who fakes “madness” to stay out of jail. But, then he gets sent to a psychiatric hospital. Once he gets in he’s like “oh, nevermind”, but now he can’t convince anyone he is not actually crazy. At the time of the writing, he had been in for 12 years. If he’d gone to jail it would have been for 5 years.
• The Happiness Hypothesis is a nice mix of ancient wisdom and modern psychology. In the book, Haidt introduces a great metaphor of an elephant and a rider where the rider is conscious thought and the elephant is all our automatic processes. The elephant does most of the work and while the rider feels in control, the elephant is going to do what it is going to do. With this book, Haidt sheds much light on the human condition and how to assess through both the lenses of old (ancient wisdom) and new (contemporary science).
• I have lived in Georgia for over 20 years, so I found Blood at the Root particularly jarring. Written by Patrick Phillips who grew up in Forsyth County (~40 miles north of Atlanta), it is the story of the forced expulsion of the black population of Forsyth in 1912. Following two violent attacks against white women in the county (one of victims died) and the quick arrest of black suspects (based more on blood lust than evidence), there was a systematic purge of the black community (about 1,100 people in total). The so called Night Riders terrorized the populace and forced everyone out in about 2 months. Once the purge was complete there was a concerted effort to “keep Forsyth white” for decades. This all culminated in two civil rights marches in 1987. Led by Hosea Williams, the first consisted of about 90 people but had to stop due to violence from protesters. The second march was a week later and brought out 20,000 people including John Lewis, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Sam Nunn, and Gary Hart.
• I finally read some Tom Perrotta. I watched The Leftovers (the HBO series) and loved it. Its always dicey to read a book after watching the movie / TV series (although less dicey than the other way around), but the book was great. I then immediately read Ms. Fletcher. Funny enough, that just came out on HBO. I watched the first episode and hated it (no big surprise — as i said above, watching after reading is hard). In the fiction realm, I also read (for the first time) some Richard Russo, Ted Chiang, and Tayari Jones. These are all 4 authors I plan to read more of. Exhalation (Chiang), a set of short stories, had one vignette that was particularly notable, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”. The basic thrust is that through some quantum chicanery, we can create parallel universe at will but it requires a “prism” which you have to get through a prism broker (which creates a whole prism black market ecosystem). Knowing there is a parallel you out there (your “paraself”) can really mess with your head. This is the jumping off point for the story and its great.

And because I’m a data nerd… below shows the number of pages in each of the 29 finished books. This totals 10,844 pages (average of 374).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 29.7 pages per day which is a fair amount higher than the last 3 years (19, 18, 19).

Previous posts on books read: 2018, 2017, 2016

(Chart creation code can be found here.)