My 2021 in Books

These are the books I read in 2021.

Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (The Practicing Stoic) was started in 2020.

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

• I was looking forward to Crossroads (2021) from the moment I heard Jonathan Franzen was working on it. And it did not disappoint. This is supposed to be Book 1 in a trilogy and I am all for two more books about the Hildebrandts. While every character has their faults, frustrations, and foibles, by the end of the book I found them all endearing. The Hildebrandts now sit alongside the Lambert family (from Corrections) and the Berglund family (from Freedom) as another fascinating fictional Franzen family (fascinating only because of Franzen’s ability to make typical American families fascinating).
• Last year I read a great book by Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, 2019), so I was excited to read Empire of Pain (2021) when it came out in April. One thing I learned that is interesting, is that the oldest Sackler brother, Arthur, made his fortune as an ad guy (he was also an MD) hocking drugs like Valium and Librium. He was the first person to directly market prescription drugs to physicians, changing the game. Arthur actually divested of Purdue Pharma early, so he is not soiled with the Oxy putridity like the rest of the Sacklers. And oh, how vile it all was (and is). Empire lays out in vivid detail how the Sacklers (there are many Sackler villains, but Richard Sackler takes the cake) pushed Oxy like a narco cartel. Here is a 2017 New Yorker article that Keefe wrote about the Sacklers – The Family That Built an Empire of Pain.
• Another “back to the well”, was reading another Sean B. Carroll book. Last year I read A Series of Fortunate Events (2020) which made me aware of Brave Genius (2013). Genius is a dual biography of the French contemporaries, Jacques Monod and Albert Camus. Carroll, as a scientist, was drawn to Monod, but also clearly has a soft spot for Camus. Both were Frenchmen (Camus was born to French parents in French Algeria) who were in the French Resistance and went on to win the Nobel Prize (Camus in 1957 in Literature and Monod in 1965 in Physiology). Camus was the editor of Combat, an underground resistance newspaper started during the German occupation while Monod ended up in the senior leadership of the French Forces of the Interior towards the end of the war. One of the interesting stories in the book relates to Monod and Lysenko, a Soviet biologist. Lysenko was an influential scientist in the Soviet Union who had a peculiar trait for a biologist – he didn’t believe in Mendelian genetics. He, instead, thought that you could bend plants to your will by imposing them to specific environments. Stalin bought Lysenko’s ideas and made him the agriculture czar; a decision that led to mass Soviet famine. With Stalin’s backing, Lysenko led a purge of any scientist that didn’t espouse his anti-genetics nonsense. In 1948, Monod took Lysenko to task in an influential article that outlined Lysenko’s folly and the danger of a political system that empowered a rogue scientists to redefine “truth” and silence critics using the power of the state. Carroll wrote about this in the Atlantic in The Molecular Biologist Who Exposed the Soviet Union. Camus also had much to say on the problems with totalitarian Stalinism – a view that put him at odds with his friend, the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, and led to their public fallout.
• Henry Molaison, known as Patient H. M. (2016), was a patient of the author’s (Luke Dittrich) grandfather. Dr. William Beecher Scoville, the great-great-nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a neurologist and prolific lobotomist. As a child, Molaison was in an accident which left him with debilitating seizures. When he was 27, in an attempt to remedy his epilepsy, Dr. Scoville performed a lobotomy (a procedure he had used on psychotic patients) suctioning out big chunks of his medial temporal lobes in both hemispheres (including the hippocampus) through two holes he had drilled in the front of his head. While it did improve his seizures, he lost the ability to create new memories (think Momento – which was based in part on H. M.). He spent the rest of his life (he died in 2008) under constant evaluation becoming the most studied patient in neuroscience. As Dittrich says, “the history of modern brain science has been particularly reliant on broken brains.” Like Phineas Gage before him, by providing insight into the relationship between disrupted faculties and missing neuroanatomy H. M. provided science with a better understanding of how our brain works.

And many more great ones. Black Boy, The Stranger, Dead Wake, Earth is Weeping… all fantastic.

And because I’m a data nerd (and there aren’t that many metrics to muck with when it comes to a reading list)… below shows the number of pages in each of the 26 finished books. This totals 10,354 pages (average of 398).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. My pace of 28.4 pages per day was a bit of an improvement from last year’s 23.3. The four years before were 29, 19, 18, and 19.

Previous posts on books read: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016

(Chart creation code can be found here.)