Best book I read this year:
1. Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham*
An absolutely terrifying and amazing book. I found myself repeatedly having to reverse the audio and listen again because I could not quite believe the words that were coming out. Far, far better than the HBO miniseries--both because it is more horrific and because it is, in some ways, more hopeful? if that's the right word. An outstanding book. But it may cost you some sleepless nights.
Honorable Mentions:
2. The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
3. Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff*
A really fine book that gives a panorama of intellectual life in the Soviet Union during Grossman's day, and gives us reason to admire Grossman even aside from his fine novels.
4. This Afterlife : Selected Poems by A.E. Stallings
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
5. Hero of Two Worlds by Mike Duncan*
An outstanding book. Lafayette was a truly incredible hero, and Duncan tells his story very well. Very much recommended.
6. The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
The person who urged me to read this said it was “the Great American Novel.” That turned out to be true. Surely this book belongs in the same class as Huckleberry Finn, insofar as an expression of what it means to be American—of the experience and the ideal of the American spirit. It’s a little too long, maybe, and in places maybe a little too melodramatic in style. But even that fits with what Cather is saying about success, and the move from humble origins to big city triumph. And all along the way, she drops in tidbits of psychological insight, spelling in precision and delicate in their subtlety. It’s not particularly dramatic; it’s sometimes a tad sentimental; it’s not especially romantic or heroic—but it is a very, very good novel.
7. Great Fortune by Daniel Okrent*
What a delightful book about the construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City. A truly rich and fascinating history that somehow touches on tons of important aspects of 20th century life.
Best new discovery:
8. The Autobiography of an Idea by Louis H. Sullivan
Not really a "new discovery," in the sense that I was familiar in a general way with Sullivan, but I had never read about him in depth. His memoir, which was written in the 1920s, but breaks off in the 1890s with his belief that American architecture had been essentially ruined by the World's Columbian Exposition, turns out to be extremely interesting, and at times spectacularly beautiful and moving. Sullivan's romanticism and individualism are passionate, powerfully expressed, and far deeper than I had anticipated. The book would make a fascinating contrast, by the way, to The Education of Henry Adams, published about 15 years earlier, and which expresses a very different opinion of modernity. Sullivan's was a truly tragic life. Yet in this book, he really found wings, at at times he soars above the country he loved so much and wanted so badly to give voice to.
Best re-read
9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Always a delightful experience.
The rest
10. Ocean Prey by John Sandford
Just a thriller. No real character development or meaning, but a fun and diverting detective story.
11. Hail the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver
Oliver's poetic skills are obviously extraordinary, but these poems did not speak to me--probably because I simply lack the cultural background. Many of them, for instance, are inspired by a novel I had never heard of.
12. The Chief by David Nasau*
William Randolph Hearst has certainly got to be one of the worst influences on American culture ever to have existed. A truly unprincipled and awful human being. Yet perversely interesting for that very reason, which is why his life inspired at least three great works of art (The Fountainhead, Citizen Kane, and After Many A Summer). Truly an important transitional figure in American politics from the Gilded Age to the age of Fascism.
13. The Sinner and the Saint by Kevin Bingham
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
14. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
I found this boring, weird, and poorly written. Maybe it was the translation? The only good part was the idea that aliens seeking to destroy humanity would first try to create an ideology among humans that was anti-progress, anti-technology, and anti-freedom. That's certainly true!
15. Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
I wrote about this for The Objective Standard.
16. Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill
This is not a good book. Superficial in its analysis and so politically correct that its grammar is literally incoherent at times (i.e., the rigorous adherence to the "they" pronoun, etc., makes it very hard to read). I recommend the late Anne Heller's fine book on Arendt instead.
17. Say What You Will by Len Krisak
Good work, but didn't really jump out at me.
18. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Architecture by Robert Twombly
A good, objective examination of Wright's life and work.
19. Yestermorrow by Ray Bradbury
A fun collection of little articles, but nothing too special. I enjoyed the essay about how when 2001 came out, movies superseded art museums entirely because, as he puts it, the art jumped off the canvases and onto the movie screens--which, he says, is why nobody likes to go to art museums anymore.
20. Mussolini by R.J.B. Bosworth
A competent biography, although it presumes a great deal of foreknowledge and may not be suitable for beginners.
21. Kindergarten Chats by Louis H. Sullivan
This book consists of some magazine articles Sullivan wrote, with the intention of composing a sort of artistic manifesto. It never quite accomplishes that, and unfortunately peters out into free verse poems that are much too long. It definitely has some fine moments, and Sullivan really was a great genius. But The Autobiography of an Idea is far superior.
22. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Jones has a rare gift for capturing the individual voices of her characters; I really believed one character was speaking, and then the other, etc. And there are parts of this book that were quite compelling. But in the end I just found it too implausible. It is not at all believable to me that the two main male characters would relate the way they do, or that the episode in the front yard with the tree (toward the climax) would end the way it did. The book also never resolved who committed the crime that initiates the action, and I found the coincidence of the father and the son implausible, too.
23. A Shark Walking Inland Is My Chief by Patrick Vinton Kirch
This is an exceptionally interesting and insightful book on Hawaiian history that tries to explore a larger question in political anthropology: how do family patriarchs become tribal chieftains? Kirch approaches this question through a combination of history, archaeology, and linguistics, and his answers are quite good...with one exception: he falls prey to the ludicrous romanticism that, alas, seems all too common when discussing Polynesia. Captain Cook tells us that of all the islands he visited, the tyrannical power of the Hawaiian kings was by far the most oppressive. It was a horrible place, frankly, where commoners were taxed brutally, women were grotesquely brutalized, and the people were subject to the death penalty for the tiniest lese majeste. Kamehameha in particular was a grotesque, murderous thug. Yet after briefly acknowledging this, Kirch backs off and says, oh, but the kings were also bound by the spirit of aloha to treat their people well, knowing they might be overthrown if they didn't--therefore their rule can't have been too brutal. Yet this is precisely what Thomas Hobbes uses to reassure us about the oppression of his Leviathan. It's not plausible there, and it's not plausible when Kirch says it, either. The ali'i were tyrants of the cruelest sort, and only modern race politics prevents us from saying so.
24. A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival by John Lingan*
I reviewed this for The Dispatch.
25. The Three Lives of James Madison by Noah Feldman*
A very fine book, with a solid and objective grasp of Madison's thought. He was such an important and brilliant thinker that any book, even a really long one, is bound to leave stuff out, but Feldman does a great job of covering basically all the important legal and constitutional controversies of Madison's lifetime, and with a high degree of accuracy. Definitely one of the best books on Madison available.
26. Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson*
This book was exactly what I was looking for: an intellectual biography of Emerson. But, perhaps inevitably, it's overly long, and tends to list books Emerson read (or, rather, skimmed) rather than really exploring what he learned from them or developing the systematic themes of Emerson's thought. It did do that to some degree, but Emerson is frustrating to anyone who attempts such a thing because his thought is basically incoherent. Honestly, I lost respect for Emerson from reading this book. He comes off as a poetaster and an emotionalistic windbag, surrounded by hippies he couldn't comprehend, rather than as a philosophic sage. One has to approach this with a recognition of how oppressive and restrictive nineteenth century New England really was, in order to appreciate why anything Emerson said came anywhere close to resonating with people. Yet he was enormously, enormously influential.
27. Debunking the 1619 Project by Mary Grabar*
I reviewed this for The Independent Review.
28. Notes on The State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Robert Pierce Forbes
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
29. Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification by David E. Bernstein
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
30. Stories in Paint by Luc Travers
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
31. Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas about Our Lives and World by Sandra Shaw
I reviewed this for The Objective Standard.
32. Strong Feather by Jennifer Reeser
Reeser is a fine poet with a unique capacity to blend Native American tradition and history with modern experiences. I must say, however, that I liked her previous book, Indigenous, more than this one, which struck me as a little less focused.
33. The People Immortal by Vasily Grossman
I wrote about this and some of Grossman's other books for The Objective Standard.
34. The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962 by Max Hastings
As with all Hastings’ books, this one is outstanding. It’s one of Hastings’ better books, in fact; its passages on Krushschev’s Russia are particularly good.
35. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury*
Much too long, but an interesting time capsule from an era before Watergate, before Vietnam; one could never write a book of such unabashed patriotism and be taken seriously in that respect. Yet it’s also quite startling in how maturely and sympathetically it deals with a gay character who plays a crucial role in the plot. Still, I thought the twist ending of the movie much better than the novel’s conclusion.
36. The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
Six hundred pages of flogging, basically. Hughes is a good writer, and his research is quite interesting, but it's bleak stuff--which was, of course, new and important at the time it was published. And it's an area of law I had previously known nothing about. Definitely worthwhile, but it may not have been the best thing to take along on Hawaiian vacation....
37. The Last Volcano by John Dvorak
A disappointing book. Aside from spelling errors and similar minor flaws, the book fails to substantiate the claim that Professor Jaggar accomplished great scientific feats, and it never tries to sell us on the romance that underlies much of the story. I sympathize with Dvorak, because I, too, sometimes latch on to relatively obscure intellectual heroes whose lives I'd like more people to know about--but that are hard to convey given the documentary record. Still, I just don't think it worked here.
38. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
This is generally considered a better book than Song of the Lark, but I preferred Song. This certainly has its moments, but I don't think the story integrates very well, and Cather never really makes clear to us why we are supposed to admire the main character. It's hinted at, but we never get a full picture of her the way we do in Song.
39. Shared History by Jean Krieling
Krieling is one of today's best poets (she won the Frost Farm Prize this year), and her book Arts and Letters and Love combined great technical skill with some fine sentiments. I enjoyed this book a lot, although Arts was a little more to my taste. Anyone looking for poetry that's at once modern but still honors traditional technique and skill should check this out.
40. My Antonia by Willa Cather
This seems to be generally regarded as Cather's best novel, but while it certainly has merit, and even some very fine moments, I liked it far less than Song of the Lark. The relationship between Jim and Antonia is quite delicately drawn, but that is done in Lark, too, and I think more effectively. One reason is that we are never truly given a reason to regard Antonia as particularly special. Lena, in fact, is a more noteworthy and even admirable character. Jim tells us time and again of his feelings for Antonia, and that's fair enough, but reasons to admire her? Or regard her as some kind of noble character? These are largely lacking. She certainly is not as remarkable as Thea in Lark. Still, it's a good novel and along with Cather's other novels, a valuable piece of history; capturing the experience of the Airplane Generation.
Books I gave up on: Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask by Ivo de Figueiredo--I didn't care for the prose style at all, which alternates between past and present tense and tends to be overly dramatic; the Evert Sprinchorn book is much better; Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, ed. by Rosalind Hursthouse, et al.--this is a worthy book, and I do intend to finish it, but I just got busy, and it requires a lot of attention. The Annals of Tacitus: this was Jefferson's favorite writer, and it does have some good passages (reading it in translation). I can also see why it appealed to Jefferson, with its focus on the causes of the loss of freedom. I got interrupted, and intend to finish it, but it may be a while.
*- denotes unabridged audio book.
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