Category: Books

Back again, this time with my eighth installment. Here are my books from 2023.

And here it is over time.

As always, lots of good ones in there I would recommend. Here are a few highlights.

• Jonathan Rosen wrote a beautiful memoir, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, about he and his childhood best friend, Michael Laudor. He tells of growing up in New Rochelle, NY in the 1970s – in “a Normal Rockwell painting”. They were bookish boys who lived in “book-filled houses”, and each had college professor fathers. They both went to Yale for college; Laudor graduating in 3 years. After college, Laudor went to work for Bain & Company with the plan to make a bunch of money in 10 years and then leave to write a book. This plan was cut short. One day a secretary “reach[ed] for him with clawed hands and bloody teeth.” The schizophrenia that would come to dominate his life had arrived. He moved back home where he became convinced that his parents were Nazi double agents. At one point his mother became so scared that she locked herself in the bedroom and called the police. He spent the next 8 months in a psychiatric unit. “Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system.” Rosen talks at length about deinstitutionalization, “a slum clearance and urban renewal for people with mental illness, a noble idea on paper disfigured by a sweeping centralized approach marred by local prejudice.” Deinstitutionalization succeeded in emptying the mental hospitals, but no working alternative was put in their place. Before his 8-month stint, Laudor had applied to Yale Law School and had deferred his acceptance. After some time in a halfway house, he started at what he called “the most supportive mental health care facility that exists in America: the Yale Law School”. The school went out of its way to provide an environment that was supportive of his special needs. The dean of the law school, Guido Calabresi, “told him that he was in a sort of invisible wheelchair and that he would place ramps wherever needed.” While at Yale he was profiled by the New York Times (A Voyage to Bedlam and Part Way Back). He told the reporter, “I feel that I’m pawing through walls of cotton and gauze when I talk to you now. I’m using 60 or 70 percent of my effort just to maintain the proper reality contact with the world.” The profile made waves. In short order he was offered a book deal and Ron Howard bought the movie rights to his story. The Laws of Madness, as it was to be called, would star Brad Pitt as Michael. This put a good deal of pressure on Laudor to get the book written quickly. He did not do well under the pressure. He stopped taking his medicine. In June 1998, Laudor killed his girlfriend in the midst of a psychotic episode. He then drove 170 miles to Cornell University and approached a campus police officer. When asked about the blood he had on him he said it was his girlfriends “or a wind-up doll.” He asked, “can we check on her?” He was arrested and charged with second degree murder, but multiple psychiatrists ruled he was unfit to stand trial. Laudor is currently committed to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, NY. Rosen visits him regularly.

• Robert Sapolsky has to be at the top of my list of people I would love to have a beer with. He’s a primatologist and neurobiologist and a professor at Stanford. As a follow-on to his “magnum opus”, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Sapolsky released Determined: Life Without Free Will in October. His main thesis is this: “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Everything is caused. “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French scholar, put forward the idea in 1814 of what has come be known as Laplace’s Demon. The idea is that if you know the state of the universe (position and momentum of every particle) at any point in time then you can use it to calculate the state of some future or previous point. This is the idea of scientific determinism. And if the laws of physics define the behavior of every atom in the universe, then why are we any different? Sapolsky builds on Behave by digging into all the biological components of our actions. He covers many scientific disciplines (biochemistry, endocrinology, neuroscience, genetics, evolution, physics, culture, etc.) and in the end finds, “there’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will”. I’ve always been struck by the story of Charles Whitman. In 1966 Whitman killed his wife and mother and then climbed to the top of a tower at the center of the University of Texas and killed 15 more people. Before the massacre, Whitman wrote a suicide note where he talked of being the “victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts” and “overwhelming violent impulses”. He also wrote, “after my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder.” An autopsy was performed, and it was discovered he had a brain tumor which was putting pressure on the amygdala (part of the brain central to fear, violence, and aggression). Does this explain why a 25-year-old “average reasonable and intelligent young man” (his words) would do something so horrific? Did the tumor change Whitman into a killer? What about Phineas Gage? Phineas Gage was a foreman on a railroad crew. One day in 1848 he was packing explosive powder into a hole using a tamping iron when there was an explosion and the iron rod shot through his eye and out the back of his head. It tore through his frontal lobe. He survived, but something changed. According to his physician, his employer had “regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again.” Further, “the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating. … A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. … His friends and acquaintances said he was ’no longer Gage’.” So, the whole essence of who someone is can be altered by damage to their brain. This is also interesting in light of the fact that “a substantial percentage of people incarcerated for violent crime have a history of concussive head trauma to the prefrontal cortex.” Sapolsky makes the point that these famous cases (Whitman, Gage, etc.) are cases where today we understand the science of cause and effect, but they are simply good illustrations of a wider phenomenon – that all our actions are driven by ‘hidden forces’ (forces outside of our control). We are pre-disposed (determined?) to push back on Sapolsky’s argument. As humans we have a visceral reaction to the idea that the feeling of control (being captain of our ship) is an illusion. Sapolsky pushes back with this, “You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.”

• I grew up in Birmingham, AL and, as I mentioned in my 2020 post, my mother was friends with Julie Armstrong who, in May, published Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home. Armstrong is a professor at the University of South Florida where she teaches civil rights movement literature. Learning from Birmingham is a beautiful memoir interwoven with Birmingham history. Armstrong had an aunt who was a juror in the 1977 trial, Alabama vs. Robert E. Chambliss trial. Fourteen years early, on September 15, 1963, a bomb ripped through the 16^th Street Baptist Church killing 4 girls (ages: 11, 3 were 14) and injuring 20 others. The dynamite bomb was planted by Chambliss and 3 others, all members of the KKK. Chambliss, known as Dynamite Bob, was sentenced to life imprison. Armstrong’s uncle had his own connection to the civil rights movement (also in a “just so happened to be there” way). In 1957, as part of the 101st Airborne Division, her uncle was deployed to Little Rock at the behest of President Eisenhower to ensure Arkansas complied with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Arkansas’s governor, Orval Faubus, was attempting to keep 9 high schoolers from attending Central High School. Just before Little Rock, Fred Shuttlesworth (the most prominent Birmingham Civil Rights leader) led an effort to integrate John Herbert Phillips High School (Armstrong’s uncle’s alma mater). In the summer of 1957, 4 Black teenagers (two of which were Shuttlesworth’s daughters) requested permission to attend Phillips High School in the fall. To intimidate Shuttlesworth and the other families, the KKK grabbed a random black citizen, Judge Aaron, off the street, tortured him, and told him to go back to Shuttlesworth with a warning to stand down. They “carved ‘KKK’ into his chest, castrated him, and poured turpentine into his wounds.” He barely survived. He did take the message to Shuttlesworth, but Shuttlesworth was undeterred. He took his family up to Phillips on the first day of school and was met by an angry mob. The mob, “beat Shuttlesworth nearly to death with chains, brass knuckles, and tire irons. His wife, Ruby, was stabbed in the hip. Their daughter Ruby Frederika came away with a broken ankle. Despite their injuries, the family showed up that night for a heavily bandaged Reverend Shuttlesworth to lead a mass meeting at New Hope Baptist Church, encouraging the packed house to keep the fight going. Phillips, however, would not desegregate until 1964.”

Previous posts on books read: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016

(Chart creation code can be found here.)

It’s that time a year again. Below is a look at my reading over the course of 2022. This is the seventh year I have done this and it’s the first time I have topped 50 books. I am not sure what was different this year, to be honest, and I doubt I will maintain the pace through 2023, but we shall see.

And here it is over time. The books in green were started in 2021.

As always, lots of good ones in there I would recommend. Here are a few highlights.

• I spent my last semester in college (2002) gallivanting / studying in Europe. On that trip a friend lent me a copy of The World According to Garp (John Irving, 1978). It was the first book I truly devoured.  It changed my relationship to reading. Once I finished it, I had a thirst for more Irving. While in Europe, I bought and read Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998). I’ve read a few of his books since that time, but none in the past 10 years or so. When I heard that The Last Chairlift (2022) was going to be his last I figured it was a good reason to pick him up again. I enjoyed the read – many characters worthy of investment. The main character (Adam Brewster) was a wrestler at Exeter Academy (just like Irving) and went on to become an author. Adam’s mother, “Little Ray” is a ski instructor who has a lifelong relationship with the “trail groomer” / “old ski patroller” (Molly) and marries (mostly to quiet some rumors) the “little snowshoer” / “little English teacher” (Elliot) whom Adam says is “the best father I could have had.” These were just some of the characters that were easy to fall in love with. I enjoyed Irving’s use of descriptive names to refer to the characters throughout the book (e.g., “the snowshoer” or “the trail groomer”). My favorite was the “diaper man” and the “infant emeritus” which he used to refer to Adam’s grandfather (a retired principal emeritus) who at Little Ray’s wedding to the snowshoer had “picked [that day] to stop walking and start crawling”. “Crawling around the big barbecue, on all fours, was the infantile Principal Brewster. He was not yet wearing his father-of-the-bride clothes, only his diaper.”
• George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021) is not like anything I read before. It is basically the book version of Saunders’ Syracuse University seminar on Russian short-story authors of the 19^th century (“a high-water period for the form”). As the subtitle says, it is a book In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Saunders says that “this is a book for writers but also, I hope, for readers.” I clearly fall in the second category. As a reader I found it gave a new appreciation for the short story and the need for “ruthless efficiency” (you have limited space so everything must be there for a reason – it has to provide value to the story). One of the stories in the book is Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” which includes the following passage (one I found particularly powerful, poignant, and brutal) spoken by the narrator (Ivan Ivanych):
  Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying— Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their dead to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition— And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives with ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.
• Before this past year I had not read any Emily St. John Mandel and over 2023 I read 5 of her books. I started with Station Eleven (2014) which is a fantastic book. It was adapted for TV and released on HBO towards the end of 2021; this is how I learned about the book. I watched the series (after reading the book) and I liked them both (which is rare). The book is a story of survival set in a post-pandemic world where the “Georgia Flu” wiped out most of civilization. It was a pretty wild read especially given that it was written years before the COVID-19 pandemic. After Station Eleven, the next two ESJM books I would recommend are: The Glass Hotel (2020) and The Singer’s Gun (2010).
• I have felt for a long time that I had a large knowledge gap when it came Reconstruction which I needed to close. I am sure we touched on it in school, but it must have been pretty cursory. From the end of Reconstruction through the middle of the twentieth century, the history of Reconstruction was dominated by what became known as the Dunning School (named after William Dunning of Columbia). In Black Reconstruction (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois said that “fortified by long study of the facts” he stood “literally aghast at what American historians have done to the field.” Eric Foner set out, in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), to provide a “coherent, comprehensive modern account of Reconstruction.” In that, he succeeded. Since its writing, it has stood as the definitive history of the era. The magnitude of what Reconstruction set out to accomplish and the initial successes in achieving its aims where dwarfed by the regression that occurred in the late 1800s. Foner’s summarizes this well: “Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed – something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation’s public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished.”
• I have always been fascinated by post-war Germany. How did a population come to terms with the horrors committed in their name? How is it that a defeated nation that had just committed genocide and crimes against humanity (as an aside East West Street (2016) is a dual biography of the men that are most associated with the introduction of those two phrases as part of the Nuremburg trials) was, by the end of the century, a respected member of the community of nation with the world’s 4^th largest economy?* Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 (2019 in Germany, 2022 in the US) seeks to answer these questions. After reading the book, my sense of the first question is that they didn’t – at least not at first. Immediately after the war, life was hard for the average German and while we tend to lack sympathy given what they had just done, from their perspective they were focused on their own hardships rather than the atrocities of the war.
  
  The difference between Nazi Party members and opponents of the regime now paled quickly, to make way for the moral value that was most important in post-war thinking: whether one could remain even partly respectable amidst the general collapse, and maintain any kind of ethical standard in the struggle for survival.
  
  The hushing-up of the extermination camps continued after the end of the war, even though the Allies tried to forcibly confront the defeated German people with evidence of Nazi crimes. Post-war Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the sardonic phrase “the blessing of late birth” to suggest that the younger generation had no right to feel quite so superior to the one that came before.
  
  It was the generation coming of age after the war that initiated the coming-to-terms. Here is a quote from a 28-year-old in 1947, “Most of our parents went along with the madness, partly out of carelessness, but also out of a lack of conscience. Of course they influenced us, their children, and thus assumed a great burden of guilt.” Given the horrors of WWII and the societal upheaval that followed the war, it is amazing to look at the success of today’s Germany. This success can be tied in no small part to the Cold War and the competition that formed between the USSR and the US; this led both (although much more the US and her post-war allies) to invest in their pieces of Germany in a game of one-upmanship. The failure of the US’s Reconstruction was driven in large part by the North’s giving up; this did not happen with post-war Germany – the US was incentivized to remain engaged and see it through to success.

As has become standard in these annual posts to do some looking at the data Below shows the number of pages in each of the 53 finished books. This totals 18,611 pages (average of 351).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book.

My pace of 51 pages per day was almost double last year’s 28. Below is a year over year look.

Previous posts on books read: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016

(Chart creation code can be found here.)

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.)

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.)

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.)

These are the books I read in 2018.

In total: 19 books, 6,952 pages.

Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (The Cartel) was started in 2017. The 2 books in tan (On Grand Strategy and 21 Lessons) are books that I have not finished.

There is some good stuff in here and many I would recommend. Here are a hew highlights.

• I finally got around to reading Getting Things Done. I would recommend this to anyone who has stuff they need to do and would like that stuff to be organized. GTD is a full-on system and a by-the-book implementation would not be for the faint of heart, but its also filled with a myriad of good ideas that you can cherry pick and add to your process. That has been my approach.
• Sean Carrol’s The Big Picture was a great read. It is a mix of scientific history and philosophy and serves as a lucid chronicle of the (to quote the subtitle) “origins of life, meaning, and the universe itself.” Carrol is a theoretical physicist at Caltech and a great synthesizer of large and complex topics.
• I downright loved Robert Wright’s new book. It is an engaging exploration of serious ideas. Why Buddhism is True strips Buddhism of the woo woo and puts it on strong naturalistic footing. By truth, Wright means that “buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct,” and he does a good job laying out the case. At its most basic level this is this: natural selection uses feelings to goad desirous (from an evolutionary point of view) behavior, pleasure is short lasting and never fully satisfying and thus serves as a good goader, our natural inclination is to respond to the goading and become controlled by the feelings, through mindfulness one can inspect these feelings and begin to escape their control. To quote a quote from the book, “ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”
• I had the fortune of being able to see Tom Ricks speak in Atlanta back in May on his Churchill and Orwell tour. I’ve read 5 of Ricks’ 6 books and find him to be a wonderful and informative read. Churchill and Orwell is interesting in its a dual biography of two historical characters one would not expect to be central casting for a single book. But, it works. I learned quite a bit about both man. And it led me to go back and reread 1984 which was fantastic.
• I knew the basic contours of the Theranos story as it had been in the news. But, in reading Bad Blood I was floored by how crazy it all was. It is crazy how far they went and it is crazy how they were able to get away with so much for so long. This was first rate reporting by John Carreyrou of the WSJ.
• My biggest junk food uptake of the year, was the Red Sparrow trilogy – Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). This was just good ‘ol US / Russia spy-vs-spy. Nothing deep and thought provoking, but fun nonetheless. I personally preferred The Kremlin’s Candidate followed by Palace of Treason. But, I enjoyed them all.

Below shows the number of pages in each of the 19 finished books. This totals 6,952 pages (average of 366).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 19 pages per day which is on par with the last 2 years (19 in 2016 and 18 last year). As with those years, the pace is quite varied where some books are consumed quickly and others were read in spurts.

(Chart creation code can be found here.)

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.)

These are the books I read in 2016.

14 books, 6,782 pages. Some great books!

Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (The Tell- Tale Brain) is a carryover from 2015. The 3 books in tan (Good to Great, Smarter Faster Better, and The Upright Thinkers) are books that I have not finished.

It’s interesting to see how it’s not 100% serial. There is a fair amount of overlap. For example, I started 4 and finished 3 books while reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Below shows the number of pages in each of the 14 finished books. This totals 6,782 pages (average of 484).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 19 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 14 books, I gave an average rating of 3.9 out of 5.

William Shirer was a foreign correspondent with UPI and CBS stationed in Europe before and during World War II. After the war he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which was first published in 1960. As the title suggests, the book covers Hitler’s and the Nazi’s rise to  power through their downfall at the end of World War II. It is a brutal and agonizing journey.

Here is Shirer’s closing:

The guns in Europe ceased firing and the bombs ceased dropping at midnight on May 8-9, 1945, and a strange but welcome silence settled over the Continent for the first time since September 1, 1939. In the intervening five years, eight months and seven days millions of men and women had been slaughtered on a hundred battlefields and in a thousand bombed towns, and millions more done to death in the Nazi gas chambers or on the edge of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen pits in Russia and Poland – as the result of Adolf Hitler’s lust for German conquest. A greater part of most of Europe’s ancient cities lay in ruins, and from their rubble, as the weather warmed, there was the stench of the countless unburied dead.
No more would the streets of Germany echo to the jack boot of the goosestepping storm troopers or the lusty yells of the brown-shirted masses or the shouts of the Fuehrer blaring from the loudspeakers.
After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness to all but a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for them too, the Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as we have seen, this great nation and this resourceful but so easily misled people to heights of power and conquest they had never before experienced and now it had dissolved with a suddenness and a completeness that had few, if any, parallels in history.

A painful part of our collective history.

To state the obvious, this book is filled with a multitude of characters and I thought it would be interesting to see who plays large rolls and, since the book (for the most part) proceeds chronologically, when the characters come on and off the stage. This led me to parse and analyze the text. I parsed the 1990 edition which is 1,029 pages. Below is a textual analysis of this book.

I parsed and analyzed the text using python and pandas. I used a superset of stop words from here and here. The graphs are in plotly. And the word clouds were made using Andreas Mueller’s generator. All of the code is in github.

Some basics about the text:

• Number of words: 571,387
• Number of words (sans stop words): 244,881
• Number of unique words: 22,748
• Number of unique words (sans stop words): 22,266

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