- Baumgartner, Paul Auster (p). A novel about writing, thinking, and aging. I first read Paul Auster as a teenager, thrown for a loop by The New York Trilogy, and I was sad to see he died last year. Auster was 77, and in this final novel the main character, Baumgartner, is a 71 year old academic writer. Reading it felt a little like saying goodbye.
- A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry (a). Multigenerational novel with characters who help make 20th century Indian politics feel more understandable, by making big events individual (the partition, The Emergency, rural to urban migration). Some similarities to the next book below: an epic where you get to know four characters well. Another similarity is that lots of bad stuff happens, though I didn’t experience this one as a tragedy per se. Unlike…
- A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (p). I banned myself from reading this for the last 10 years (it came out in 2015), but finally caved. This year I went on an extended trip to New York with four friends, and that context was too potent, since the stage and setting for the novel is four friends in New York. I cannot in good faith recommend reading A Little Life, though I must admit I inhaled all 800 pages, and my heart kept dropping, so you might not be able to resist either.
- The Possession, Annie Ernaux (p). Short meditation on jealousy.
- Chess, Stefan Zweig (p). Short meditation on obsession. Zweig had left Austria by 1934, after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, and wrote this in Brazil in 1941, the year before killing himself.
- In Youth is Pleasure, Denton Welch (p). Short meditation on mania (in childhood).
- Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, Nadia Asparouhova (p). There’s something transgressive about selectively quoting parts of a book about antimemes, so here goes: “Societies function better when they have a category of ideas that escape precise definition [e.g. community, mentorship, love, happiness, culture, education, progress], because ideas that can be measured can be controlled, or even exploited.” / “WE ARE NOW LIVING IN what might be termed ‘late-stage memetic society’ but ‘early-stage antimemetic society’: a patchwork of settlements that has opened its borders to refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” / “virality is no longer automatically considered desirable. If an idea spreads too quickly, it might escape its original context; its meaning could become distorted, and pushback could be so strong that it destroys the idea altogether.” / The book is about antimemes, important ideas that refuse to spread, but I found the discussion of their Waluigi interesting too: “supermemes take the form of a civilizational threat that demands us to prioritize it over everything else. … War is human civilization’s oldest supermeme: … It forces everyone in the network to direct their attention towards a single narrative.” / “When supermemes lack a clear focus on specific outcomes, they can trap people in a state of permacrisis that never fully escalates or resolves.” / “Supermemes are like an invasive species. When too many supermemes crowd a network, they can threaten its comparatively more diverse and generative creative ecosystem. … They may look and act like interesting ideas, but they are primarily selfish, doing whatever it takes to prolong their existence.” / Finally: “IF ANTIMEMES ARE A DEFENSE MECHANISM in response to cognitive overload, we know how to make things more or less antimemetic: by mastering control of our attention and wielding it to shine a light on whatever we want to make more real in the world.” Indeed. Hence…
- Something to Do with Paying Attention, David Foster Wallace (p). He did kind of nail it. This was written before the invention of the iPhone, so it’s a good reminder that the primacy of attention, and our problems with it, has been here the whole time. I read this on my coauthor’s recommendation, after we wrote this piece on attention. An aside from the main point, but I (we) also liked this one pun about joining the IRS workforce: “‘Gentlemen, you are called to account.'” Plus, I liked the descriptions of the main character’s father; just so exactly evocative: “like most men of his generation, he was both high-strung and tightly controlled, a type A personality but with a dominant super-ego, his inhibitions so extreme that it came out mainly as exaggerated dignity and precision in his movements. He almost never permitted himself any kind of open or prominent facial expression. But he was not a calm person. He did not speak or act in a nervous way, but there was a vibe of intense tension about him” / “he was wise enough to be suspicious of his own desire to seem wise, and refuse to indulge it”.
- Selected Poems, Thom Gunn (p). Thom Gunn is on the list of literary figures I wish I’d met, though mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons. I wrote more about him here. My favourite poems from this anthology: ‘Tamer and Hawk’, ‘Words’, ‘The Discovery of the Pacific’, ‘All Night, Legs Pointed East’, ‘Autobiography’. ‘Lament’, ‘The J Car’, ‘In Trust’. My very favourite two: ‘Rites of Passage’ and ‘The Hug’. I’ve asked for the new Michael Nott biography of Gunn for Christmas.
- Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, Charles Piller (a). I read some of Piller’s pieces in Science magazine as they came out over the last few years, about fraud in Alzheimer’s research. In this book he puts it all together. Grim stuff.
- The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong (p). Between Vuong’s poetry, his first novel, and this, personally I’d give it to the poetry (#12). Perhaps I’ve listened to too many interviews with him because I can’t quite get the writer out of my head in the novels. That isn’t such a problem for the first novel (#30) since the autofiction there veers so auto, but for this one it blocked my immersion in some scenes. That said, I liked the topic of this novel, which I heard Vuong describe somewhere as kindness without hope.
- The Futurological Congress, Stanisław Lem (p). Published in 1971, hallucinogenic, and otherwise difficult to describe. Cryptochemocracy and LTN bombs (LTN: Love Thy Neighbor). “I forced myself to think only of the most unpleasant things … only to realize, with horror, that I loved them all, forgave them everything” / “The rats reluctantly made room for me. They were still walking about on two legs. But of course — it dawned on me — hallucinogens! If I could think I was a tree, why couldn’t they think they were people?” / There’s a middle section of several pages that is simply a list of puns of futuristic enhancement drug names; I was (am) confused how they’re so good, given the book is translated from Polish.
- Nothing Personal, James Baldwin (p). Essay from 1964, republished as a standalone book. Intense despair and love. “One has to look at oneself as the custodian of a quantity and quality–oneself–which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again.”
- I Remember, Joe Brainard (p). Memoir of childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1940/50s, where each paragraph is a sentence starting with “I remember…”. Makes you feel connected when he hits on some private thing you did too as a child. E.g. “I remember school desk carvings and running my ball point pen back and forth in them”, “I remember the very thin pages and red edges of hymn books”, “I remember filling the ice trays too full and trying to get them back to the refrigerator without spilling any”, “I remember how difficult it is to let a ‘public’ grin fall gracefully.” The book made me want to try my own exercise, writing childhood memories in that format to see what spills out. Someone should make a Twitter account of these that tweets a new one out each day.
- Honored Guest, Joy Williams (p). Dark and weird. Williams is great at sentences that don’t make literal sense but convey something better than straightforward English would: “‘I don’t know anything about questions,’ Miriam said.” / “The Pistol Institute [self-defense training] was in a shopping mall where all the other buildings were empty and for lease … over its door was the sign Be Aware of Who Can Do Unto You.” (I laughed at that one) / “‘I think it’s a little late for us to be discussing Kant with such earnestness,’ Freddie said. “You mean a little this night late or a little life late?”‘/ “‘Your life’s not assimilating your days and that’s not good, Dennis.'” / “‘May I suggest what I believe?'” / “Sitting and drinking, pretty much alone in that unpopular place, she would watch the painting with all her heart.”/ “‘Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,’ Darleen said.” /// Then a bunch of other nice descriptions I underlined while reading: “Then it was dawn. She had not slept but she felt alert, glassy even.” / “The mountain is 9,157 feet tall, and is 6,768 feet above the city. Numbers interest me and have since the second grade. My father weighed one hundred pounds when he died.” / “The hurricane had destroyed the pond where he kept his pet carp.” / “She’d like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little.” / “One of the reasons Caroline had acquired the dog was to practice concern.” There are a lot of margaritas and dogs in the stories. And a repeated theme of trading places — bat for hummingbird, person for person, “Soul and body alike are often substituted.”
- Free and Equal, Daniel Chandler (a/p). I listened to most of this as an audiobook in 2023, then finished it off on paper once the American publisher’s version came out. Chandler uses political philosophy (in this case Rawls) to derive a substantive political agenda (in this case progressivism) — 45-50% of GDP as spending by the state, universal basic income, and more. I liked the ambition and the specificity, and it made me want to read a book called Free and Equal that derives conservatism from Rawls, to test the method. My main issue as a Rawls-outsider has always been: how do you draw the bounds of the society in which these freedom and equality principles are applying? One substantive conclusion from this book is “developing a more detailed plan for how we can curb emissions and protect fragile ecosystems is the most urgent policy imperative of our time.” (p269) But that is clearly beyond the bounds of UK society, where Chandler is writing, or the US, which together make up a minority of CO2 emissions. And if we are considering humanity, not the nation state of the writer, then Rawls’ difference principle leads to radically different conclusions, because some countries have median incomes 50 times lower than the UK. Not 2, not 5, not 10 — 50!
- The Cancer Code, Jason Fung (a). Accessibly written, a more opinionated version of The Emperor of Maladies (#23). Fung’s basic gist is: cancer paradigm 1.0 said cancer is a disease of excessive growth of cells — true, but why do they grow excessively? Cancer 2.0 said the excessive growth is due to random genetic mutations — true, but outside of a few genes like BRCA2, why has that understanding not led to more cures? Cancer 3.0, his favoured explanation, is to view things from an evolutionary perspective: genes mutate as a survival response against chronic sublethal injury (infections like hepatitis B, smoking, obesity), and the force behind those mutations is a drive towards a unicellular state. In other words, cancer is not random and emergent, it is an atavism — like people born with webbed fingers or the beginnings of a tail. Billions of years ago cells started alone and had to evolve to be cooperative in an organ, a body; the genetic material to be uncooperative has been there the whole time, in every cell, and is usually just well regulated.
- When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever (a). Literary memoir of Cheever’s relationship with her father, the famous short story writer John Cheever (think: Mad Men). Susan Cheever is now 82 and just lays it all out here. Chapter 5, “The Little Girl Stories”, describes parts of her childhood that her father packaged into fiction, without many changes, and sold to The New Yorker. This book gets you reading John Cheever short stories on the side. “The Swimmer” and “Reunion” (short) are just so good. As I was listening, I kept thinking of Ada Calhoun’s literary memoir (#1) about her father, also about midcentury New York, also about a daughter who becomes a writer and a father who seems to be a better writer than a father. As Cheever could tell what I was thinking, because at point she mentioned Calhoun’s memoir directly in my ear and made the connection explicit.
- The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow (p). My dad recommended this to me 10 years ago, maybe more. I just got around to it, and can confirm it was a good recommendation. In 1959, C. P. Snow worried that intellectual life was dividing into two mutually distrusting and mutually incomprehensible cultures: literary, and scientific. The stakes of that were high, because the scientific revolution underway had the potential to raise everyone globally out of poverty, but literary types thought scientists didn’t get the meaning of life (perhaps true, but let’s end poverty first and then debate it). It is heady to read some of this essay with the benefit of 67 years more hindsight, when intellectual life has changed so much, culture has changed so much, and the drivers of fragmentation vs trust have changed too. And yet, much has not changed, and many of the same concerns still stare us in the face. Here’s a pdf version.
- Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science, Warren Weaver (p). I finally cracked after years of Weaver recommendations, and read his autobiography. My favourite book in a long time. It’s extremely relevant to my professional life, so I can’t guarantee that experience will generalise, though! The book is a wonderful embrace of American optimism and Midwestern humility.
- Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke (a).
This year was a big one for magazines and blogs, for me. Something about that length scratches the itch for nonfiction.
Jacob Trefethen 