This year, I’m aiming to read 52 books (one per week for a year). I’ll be keeping track of this in this post.

Books

1) Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick

  • A quick read, but a rather illuminating one. I picked this up mostly because of the Pulitzer win, but found an incredibly illuminating biography of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and a great history of the early days of ISIS.

2) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

  • Klein’s core argument is that governments (particularly the US) often use violence and catastrophic events to precede the introduction of free-market capitalism. Her argument is interesting, and I learned quite a lot about the world history of the past 50 years. I’m not sure I agree with many of her arguments, and she often seems to conflate correlation with causality, though her core argument is quite provocative.

3) The Stranger by Albert Camus

  • I admit, I picked this primarily because I wanted something short to prepare before the next monster. It’s a strange book, colored primarily by the detachment of Mersault, and his total detachment from the world. It will probably take a couple more reads to appreciate it fully, but for now, it merely remains disquieting rather than profound.
    4) The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

  • This was another quick read to balance out tearing through a 600+ page history of the CIA. Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised. Ross builds an inspiring and hugely optimistic view of the next 50 years, but does it in a way that’s very well balanced. He focuses on the downsides of and roadblocks to many of the innovations he talks about in a way that’s far more nuanced than most innovation-focused books. I loved this and would recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in technology and the future.

    • Also worth reading is a brutal critique of the book by a man who Ross refers to in the book as a “Luddite Harvard graduate student”. Critique found here.

5) Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

  • An absolute riveting indictment of the CIA. Weiner is almost too relentless in examining every failure of the CIA, and the portrait that emerges is utterly scathing.

6) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

  • Despite growing up in Alabama, I never read this book during all my years of primary schooling. It’s pretty good, though the problem with such “classic” novels is that time and overexposure often robs them of their power. It’s a good book, though not quite as riveting as its reputation suggests.

7) The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen

  • I came into this book expecting something approaching a biography of Putin, but instead found a book-length account of his follies and abuses. Though I wish the book had been more focused and provided a bit more insight into Putin himself, I did learn quite a bit about modern Russian history (specifically incidents that may or may not have been ordered or perpetrated by Putin). I also wish this book had provided me with a bit more insight into the current state and pulse of Russian society with relation to Putin, but I’ll settle for the book-length polemic against the Putin regime that I found.

8) Submission by Michel Houellebecq

  • This book is nuts. It’s a picture of a man who is completely lost and detached from the world outside him. While I was expecting this to play out much like Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, the way in which the narrator is drawn into political events around him turns it into something which I cannot completely grasp. I have read very few books with this much intelligence and guts.

9) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

  • This is my second or third read of this book, and it remains one of the best novels I have ever read. It’s psychedelic, all-encompassing, a bit unreadable at points (there are only so many times I want to read about Alfred Lambert wetting himself). But it’s also generous and creates characters that I legitimately cared deeply about. And it also manages to wring emotion from the unlikeliest of places. Definitely worth the reread.

10) Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

  • Well that was unexpected. I picked up this book expecting to get a breezy humor book, but instead found a suprisingly thoughtful and thorough examination of how technology and modern life are changing love and romance. I was surprised at how much time and effort Ansari put into this, even recruting a sociologist to be co-author. A quick and worthwhile read, and one that I learned a thing or two from. Who knows, maybe it’s time to up my Tinder game?

11) Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

  • This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s rare to read something that’s so clearly about a subject that the author is completely obsessed with. Finnegan writes about a life that is so well-lived that it is inspiring. He also seems to have an extraordinary ability to remember every detail of seemingly every wave that he ever surfed. It’s not often that someone else’s passion can feel so life-changing and life-affirming, but that’s ultimately what this book is: a life-length love letter to a little-understood art.

12) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  • Another day, another incredible book. Hochschild, despite being the classic liberal stereotype (Berkeley sociology professor), went into Louisiana for 5 years and came out of it with one of the most moving and illustrative books about the South ever written. Within the space of about 240 pages, Hochschild explains Southern attitudes towards business, the environment, religion, and so much more. In particular, the 11th chapter is an extraordinary account of the beliefs of conservatives that it had me in tears. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand the other side of the political spectrum.

13) Playing to the Edge: American: Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael Hayden

  • Michael Hayden is a man who does not pull a whole lot of punches. In this incredible memoir, he tells his side of the story as one of the most senior officials in the US intelligence community during the Bush Administration. While I’ve heard and read mountains criticizing various programs put in place and continued under Hayden, it’s fascinating to hear his accounts of these programs. And it’s equally fascinating to see how both sides of the story are essentially right. Yes, many of the programs Hayden oversaw and put in place argualy paved the way for the erosion of American civil liberties and America’s moral standing internationally. Yes, these programs may have been the best possible choices taken by experienced men and women who wanted nothing more than to serve and protect their country in extraordinary and trying circumstances. It seems that the controversy surrounding many of these issues may be the reason why this book can’t seem to get a single fair review, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.

14) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

  • This book hit hard. While I’m not sure I completely agree with Vance’s “pick yourself up by the bootstraps” message to the American working class, I found large chunks of his story almost uncomfortably familiar. It’s a hell of a book, and a hell of a life.

15) Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

  • As most Franzen novels, Freedom is brilliant. There are moments when its information-overload style becomes a bit monotonous, and its self-loathing characters become a bit much, but any rough edges the book may have are redeemed by the last 50 pages, which comprise the most redemptive about-face in American literature. Franzen still manages to be one of the few that manage to write serious novels this readable.

16) Neuromancer by William Gibson

  • This one is a trip. I’d be remiss if I implied that I had any idea of what was going on here, but Neuromancer is nothing if not insane. Despite my confusion, Gibson’s prose and his strange visions of bombed-out hackers and space ports kept me going. Definitely a book I’ll have to reread.

17) American War by Omar El Akkad

  • Leave it to an immigrant to write one of the most fascinating American novels. El Akkad does an extraordinary job finding what makes this country tick, and creates a plausible future history for the US, creating a scifi reality that feels deeply plausible. And he anchors it around a character that I grew to care about and understand, even as her actions became progressively more unforgivable. An extraordinary debut.

18) The Circle by Dave Eggers

  • Dear God, I hated this book. Eggers desperately wants this book to be 1984, but fails to create any compelling characters, explore any ideas beyond the most tired anti-Facebook tropes, and is nowhere near as funny as he wants to be. The novel’s plot points make daytime soap operas seem plausible, and I hated every single person in this book. At least it’s a quick read, so you don’t have to wallow in this garbage for too long.

19) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

  • This is the best novel I have read thus far this year. Leckie’s masterful debut contains volumes, managing to explore everything from gender to identity to the fall of empires. It’s an extraordinary book, belying its puly roots with intelligence and a hell of a story.

20) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

  • Absolutely one of the finest books I have ever read about poverty. Desmond keeps policy recommendations towards the end, and allows finely drawn and unflinching narrations of the everyday lives of the poor to tell most of the story. What results is a book about housing that is absolutely wrenching, but never loses sight of the humanity inherent in all these stories.

21) Under the Dome by Stephen King

  • This book is a pretty strong reminder of the best and worst of Stephen King. It’s a gripping read, one of the few thousand-page books that I’ve finished in under a week. King manages to pack each chapter with revelations and cliffhangers, and for most of the book’s going, it’s an absolute blast. But any book this large is excessive by definition, and there are plenty of places where the story drags. By the time the explosive climax came along, I desperately wanted the story to end, and the extra hundred or so pages dedicated to the slow suffocation of the town was far too much. Combine that with the abrupt ending, and you have a book that’s a bit too fond of torturing its characters.

22) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

  • It’s rare that a book completely changes my view on something, but Ghettoside succeeded in changing my view of policing in the US. While the dominant public narrative is that we have too much policing which disproportionately targets communities of color, Leovy argues that America’s epidemic rates of black-on-black homicide are due to a lack of policing for these homicides. While Leovy doesn’t make a strong case using historic trends or data, she does string together threads of a compelling argument on the micro-scale, focusing on the single case of an LAPD detective’s murdered son, and the journey to find and prosecute his killers. While Leovy doesn’t necessarily show that thorough investigation and prosecution leads to decreased murder rates, the picture she paints of murder in South Central LA and the individual stories she tells are more than compelling enough. While not 100% convincing, this book remains absolutely brilliant.

23) The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

  • This book was so brilliant that I immediately purchased a collection of Bacigalupi’s short stories. Like Ancillary Justice, The Windup Girl uses an excruciatingly detailed world to explore issues far too numerous to list. Imperialism, orientalism, environmentalism: all of these are explored within the book, but never in a way that’s preachy or pedantic. Bacigalupi simply uses well-drawn characters and even more well-drawn world to extrapolate what is happening now into a future that feels entirely too real. There were scenes of brutality that were a bit too extreme for my tastes, but Bacigalupi’s characters feel fare more nuanced and real than most novels I’ve read. An absolutely brilliant novel.

24) Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

  • I can defintely understand Ted Chiang’s stature in the science fiction community after reading this collection. Inherently, as a collection of stories, there were definitely stories I enjoyed far more than others, but on the whole, this was an incredible collection of stories. Many of these brought to mind Borges, using rigorous investigations of fantastical premises to explore the limits of the human experience. Particularly, “Understand”, “Hell Is the Absence of God”, and “Story of Your Life” are among the best things I have read in my life.

25) American Gods by Neil Gaiman

  • I’m not sure I fully processed Gaiman’s novel, but it’s certainly a hell of a trip. Gaiman presents small-town America as the home for ancient gods, and creates a world where the magical and the mundane reside side-by-side. Much of the power comes from the hallucinatory images and prose, as well as Gaiman’s exploration of themes far larger than you get in the average novel. Love, death, and immigration are thoroughly plumbed throughout the course of the story, and Gaiman twists classic tropes into near-unrecognizable shapes as he explores these themes. Definitely warrants another read.

26) Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

  • The Windup Girl had me so taken in that I couldn’t help but grab another of Bacigalupi’s books, and Pump Six does not disapoint. As expected from a short-story collection, some stories are better than others, though the quality is generally so high in this book that it’s almost mind-melting. The Fluted Girl, The People of Sand and Slag, and Pump Six are particularly incredible, as are The Calorie Man and Yellow Card Man, two stories that directly tie into the world of The Windup Girl. But for my money, Pop Squad is one of the most horrendous and incredible things I have ever read. The logic of the tale is impeccable, though it’s incredible how it crafts conclusions that are simultaneously inescapable and utterly monstrous. Definitely worth reading.

27) Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

  • Holy shit. This books is absolutely incredible. While the going is as rough as many reviews have claimed (Lee doesn’t particularly enjoy explaining the details of her incredibly complex worlds outright), the story and world that emerges is absolutely mindblowing. The mixture of math, magic, politics, and betrayal is absolutely riveting, and I couldn’t put the book down after the first 10 pages (I had also done a good bit of research firsthand, and had a reasonably good understanding of what was happening in the world). I cannot recommend this book highly enough: it rivals Ancillary Justice as the best novel I have read this year.

28) One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway – and Its Aftermath by Åsne Seierstad

  • This book certainly doesn’t pull any punches. It’s very difficult to write clearly about this book, primarily because it’s an incredible book about an unspeakable topic. While the perpetrator’s story is probably the primary focus of the book, I greatly appreciated how Seierstad really attempted to make the book about and for the victims of the Norwegian attacks. I learned quite a bit about Norwegian politics and society, as well as about the incident itself, but it’s hard to recommend a book about something so horrendous (incredible as it may be).

29) Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

  • I was thoroughly disappointed by Ann Leckie’s follow-up to Ancillary Justice. While I can respect her desire to examine the Raadch empire at a far more micro scale, I really wanted to know more about Anaander Mianaai and the civil war going on. Leckie instead takes us to a backwater station totally removed from the events that actually matter. Honestly, as well-written as this book was, I was just bored.

30) The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

  • Le Guin is as tough for me as she was when I first read the Earthsea Trilogy. Le Guin doesn’t really care about action, suspense, or plot. She’s more interested in human relationships, and the way in which societies create myths and tales to explain themselves and their world. The Left Hand of Darkness, though sometimes a bit too dry, was incredible in the manner in which it built up a completely immersive and detailed world, with as much care and detail as Tolkien. I thought this was pretty incredible, though I wasn’t in quite the pensive and patient state that I should have been in to fully enjoy the book.

31) The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larso

  • Another of the best books I have read this year. Larson wrote an incredible book balancing the history of a tremendous, yet mostly forgotten, event with an account of a monster at work. Both are fascinating, though I surprisingly ended up enjoying the history of the World’s Fair more than the crime accounts. Absolutely astonishing, and will definitely read everything that Larson has written now.

32) Columbine by Dave Cullen

  • This is another book about a terrible event. Difference between this and One of Us is that the latter had an incredibly powerful narrative thrust to carry me through the pain. This book did not. While Cullen does a fine job of painting the event, the motivations, and the characters in play, I felt that it was just not enough to balance out or redeem the darkness of the subject material.

33) Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

  • Stunningly beautiful book. I just had no idea what was going on. Oyeyemi is a tremendous writer, and her writing is worth it for the beauty alone. Unfortunately, I’m not bright enough to figure out what happened in this book. Maybe another time.

34) Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

  • I thought this book was absolutely incredible. VanderMeer creates this incredible setting and vibe that I’ve never encountered before. Much of the power of this book is the ideas of humans’ insignificance in the face of nature and the way it explores these ideas through Area X itself. An absolutely incredible blending of Lovecraft with ecology.

35) Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

  • Unfortunately, this was a bit of disappointment. I figured the second book in the trilogy couldn’t match Annihilation, but Authority just doesn’t hold a candle to the first book. While there is some interesting spy-shenanigans going on and a nice sense of paranoia, there is very little to match the mystery and horror of the first book.

36) Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

  • Absolutely brilliant. Demick opens an unfamiliar and brutal world. There is no other book I’ve heard of that offers such an intimate and unbiased portrait of North Korea.

37) The Vegetarian by Han Kang

  • I heard and read very mixed things about this book, but I found it absolutely astonishing. Han evokes Kafka pretty strongly, as most reviewers have suggested, but there is much more here. Han asks hugely provocative questions about agency, feminism, and desire, and refuses to answer any of them. Most importantly, Han refuses to answer the fundamental question of “What’s actually happening here?”, which seemed to frustrate the hell out of most readers. I find the messiness and cold existential terror to be quite comforting.

38) Books of Blood, Vols. 1-3 by Clive Barker

  • Considering how morbid this book is, I had a really fun time with it. While there are the expected handful of stinkers that you have with a short-story collection (I wasn’t a huge fan of Son of Celluloid or Scape Goats), but the vast majority of these stories are absolutely fantastic. There are even a handful (In the Hills, the Cities, Dread Jacqueline Ess) that rank among the most incredible things I’ve ever read. Barker cares very little about restraint and propriety and provides story after story of blood-churning violence and graphic sex. But there’s a lot more to these than just that. In The Hills, the Cities especially stands out as absolutely incredible.

39) Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

*

40) It by Stephen King

*

41) The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin

*

42) The Shadowed Sun by N. K. Jemisin

*

43) Caliban’s War by James S. A. Corey

*