These are the books I read in 2020.
Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (Sing, Unburied, Sing) was started in 2019. The book in tan was just started and has not been finished.
There are definitely some good ones in there I would recommend. Here are a few highlights.
- Say Nothing (title comes from a 1975 poem by Seamus Heaney, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing) is a well told, engaging account of the Troubles – the violence in Northern Ireland from roughly 1968-1998. I was unaware of much of this history – familiar with the basic contours, but not the details. Patrick Radden Keefe (writer for the New Yorker) does a nice job telling the story. It was fascinating to watch the evolution of Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams. Part of the reason Keefe can tell such a rich story was that many of the major players of the Troubles gave taped interviews. Starting in 2001, the Boston College’s Belfast Project, interviewed over 100 loyalists and republicans including both Hughes and Price. They did this under the expectation that the tapes would remain secret until after their death. Problem was that the police in Northern Ireland caught wind of the tapes and worked with the US Dept of Justice to get access as part of the investigation into the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville (mother of 10). They succeeded. After all of that transpired, BC destroyed their copies of the interviews (they gave each participant a copy of their interview before doing so). Keefe was able to get access to the interviews with Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes. Also, he was able to interview Anthony “Mackers” McIntyre, the researcher who interviewed all of the republican participants, which allowed him to reconstruct many of these conversations. Here is a 2015 New Yorker article that Keefe wrote while researching the book – Where the Bodies are Buried.
- A could of years ago I read a book (Blood at the Root) which mentioned a lady named Mary Turner who was brutally murdered in south Georgia in 1918. It was a particularly horrifying lynching. After reading the short mention, I did a google search to learn more about what happened. I quickly stumbled upon Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching by Dr. Julie Armstrong. It turns out that Dr. Armstrong was friends with my mother and I remember her from when I was a kid. She and I emailed a bit and she was gracious enough to send me a signed copy of her book. I am thankful that she did. It was a powerful read. Hayes Turner, Mary Turner’s husband, was lynched as part of a spree of violence sparked by the murder of a white farmer (Hampton Smith). Hearing that Mary Turner planned to press charges against those that killed her husband, the lynch mob found her and took her to a bridge overlooking Little River (about 15 miles north of Valdosta). “There a crowd of several hundred watched the mob hang her upside down, shoot her, set her on fire, remove her fetus, and stomp the unborn into the ground.” She was 8 months pregnant. Can you imagine something more viscous and depraved? Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching charts the artistic responses to this heinous act as a way to understand how society has remembered lynching over the last 100 years. As Dr. Armstrong says, “black spots on a map cannot convey the emotional impact of lynching.” It was “film, literature, and visual art [that] revealed lynching as existential, spiritual crisis – laying waste to bodies, landscapes, psyches, and souls.” In 2010, the Georgia Historical Society (in concert with local groups) had a historical marker placed at the location of Mary Turner’s murder in honor of her and the other victims of the lynching rampage. This marker has been the target of vandalism on multiple occasions (sprayed with bullets, rammed by a truck, etc.). The marker was taken down this past October after the most recent round of vandalism; it has not been put back up. One would like to think that in our present time these sorts of actions would be behind us; sadly, it appears that is not the case.
- Hope Jahren is a geobiologist and quite the writer (who, it so happens, spent some time at Georgia Tech). Lab Girl is a mix of memoir, her development as a scientist and adventures with her partner-in-crime Bill Hagopian, and plant / tree interestingness. This was a great book. Hilarity, beautiful vignettes, touching moments, tales of friendship, the raw realness of life. Lots of goodness.
- Apparently there are two Sean Carrolls. I heard about Sean B. Carroll on Sean M. Carroll’s podcast. M is a theoretical physicist (wrote The Big Picture which I read in 2018). B is a biologist with a focus on evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”). In A Series of Fortunate Events, Carroll starts with a discussion of the the K-Pg asteroid (the dinosaur destroying one) impact and its ramifications (e.g. mammal evolution sped up significantly after the impact). It turns out that if the asteroid’s impact had shifted +/- 30 min, the dinosaurs likely remain and we never make it (if the dinosaurs stick around, humans likely never evolve). So, lucky for us. Being an evolutionary biologist it is no surprise that Carroll’s major focus is on evolution. He has a great quote from Jacques Monod’s 1971 Chance and Necessity, “Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses.” [side note: I recently noticed that Carroll wrote a book on Monod and his contemporary, Albert Camus, Brave Genius, which I hope to read soon.] Carroll digs into the role of chance in evolution, genetics, disease and much more. This is a short little book that packs a lot of goodness in small space; it was a great read.
And because I’m a data nerd… below shows the number of pages in each of the 26 finished books. This totals 8,487 pages (average of 326). Apparently I took it easy this year. Last year was ~10.8k pages (so, this year was down about 25%). You’d think that with the pandemic reading would have increased, but things were pretty busy at the beginning and I definitely slowed down.
And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 23.3 pages per day which is a drop from last year (29.7), but in line with the 3 years before that (19, 18, 19).
Previous posts on books read: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
(Chart creation code can be found here.)