Got through 81 books this year. Self-employment/sabbatical/trying to start a business ftw in terms of reading I guess! Didn’t realize how many until I counted here. As I get older I have trouble remembering which books I read this year and which I read in the past. I swear I’d read a book yesterday that I read a few years ago and I’d swear that some of the books from earlier this year were from college days. So it goes…

Started with The Sailor Who Fell in Love With the Sea and ended with C Elements of Style. Mishima’s homo-erotic-ness was a surprise, but then again Sun and Steel could have been written by some conflicted gay guys I’ve known so maybe its not so surprising. C Elements of Style had good timeless advice, but mostly just made me happy that I don’t work in 1993 C world.

The best books were:

  • Never Finished - David Goggins, great book. He was raw and personal with this one.
  • A Streetcar Named Desire - Wasn’t expecting to like this one as much as I did but it was a masterpiece. Well worth reading, I need to watch the movie.
  • Four Ways to Forgiveness - Le Guinn is one of my favorites. This was one of her best. “All knowledge is local or universal but both are true”
  • Brain Energy - A Harvard Psychiatrist outlines his theory of mental illness as metabolic disease. My psychiatrist friend hasn’t read it or reviewed it yet I bet but it was certainly compelling to a layman like me. Diet is super important to mental health anecdotally and has some data behind it. Eat clean.
  • Dune Series (Frank Herberts) - Re-read the Frank Herberts, they’re just as good as the last 10 times I read them.
  • Spy Wars - A really interesting book. I’d always heard the “Angleton is crazy as a loon because of Philby” story and believed it, until I read this book. Bagley lays out the Nosenko case in a way that is entirely unaddressed in all the people who write the Angleton is crazy stories. If true the CIA got things completely wrong and exiled these two for being right. One of the craziest things I remember is that Bagley claimed that Nosenko didn’t know how to send a wire or request a file at KGB, things that he would have literally done 100s of times a week.
  • The Dawn of Everything a New History of Humanity - Graber isn’t my guy (the guy wrote a bunch of books about money and finance that were completely out of line). However, he’s always interesting. This book was interesting if only because it was a lot of anthropological information about various cultures and a lot of pre-history data and evidence that I’d never run into anymore. Well worth reading. My takeaways in this short blurb are, humans traveled much more than we realized in the pre-history era. There’s a lot of evidence that city-sized groups of people existed pre-agriculture (which is the common narrative). He convinced me of both. Lots of other interesting things too although I don’t know if I quite agreed with his central thesis that people just do things the opposite of what other people are doing a lot of the time.
  • The Best of Everything - Probably my favorite book of the year and unexpected at that. Five city girls in NYC from the 50s and their trials and tribulations. Proto-feminist. I thought it was great. Reminded me of working as an office dweller in SF a decade ago now.
  • The Martian - Good as everyone said. We need more optimistic scifi.
  • A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves - Naomi Novick. She’s one of my favorite authors and these kinda sealed the deal for me. The Last Graduate was absolutely amazing. It ended at a perfect crescendo. Hemingway couldn’t have done better.
  • A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (GRRM needs to release the next two books) - He really needs to release the next two books. This book read so fast that it disappointed me and the stories were just as good as Song of Fire and Ice. It made me yearn for Winds of Winter. :-(

Other Interesting things I learned or remembered from books this year:

  • Asimov on the Bible - Lots of heretical stuff I’m sure but it was a surprisingly good book at connecting actual historical people, places, and things to events that happened in the Bible. I’ve read the Bible three times cover to cover and it was still interesting to make all the connections that I probably should have made before but never did. He makes some leaps but I wonder how much of his scholarship would survive a modern secular biblical historian.
  • Visuddhimagga - Learned about the process of meditation and attaining Nirvana and all the steps needed to get there. Some of it was fanciful but a lot of it was down to Earth. Interesting except for all the lists and numbered items.
  • Chaos: A New Kind of Science - I’m pretty sure Andrew Huberman’s dad is in this book toward the end. He’s certainly a physicist doing chaos theory in the 80s and 90s at the same time Huberman is growing up.
  • Lifespan Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To: Sinclair’s most optimistic take on reversing or getting rid of aging. I want to take metformin and NVM but they’ve taken it off market. He def convinced me we’re probably closer than people realize to overcoming aging.

Full list is here