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Notes -
This year I've read 62 books (so far). I hope to read a few more before the new year, but it won't be more than 65. Quite a bit less than the 89 I read last year, but I think as @FiveHourMarathon has said, there are other things to do with one's time besides read. I didn't do as good of a job reflecting on these books as I did last year, so that's something to work on in the new year. 32 of these books were in English, 28 in Spanish and 2 in Italian. Some favorites below.
Best Fiction Book: Niccoló Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
You know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!
I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.
Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.
Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.
Best Non-fiction Book: Mi pais inventado by Isabelle Allende
I've read a lot of Isabelle Allende's fiction, and I enjoyed this much more. Allende has an annoying habit of masking her ideology and philosophy behind characters and situations that make you feel like a villain for disagreeing with, despite those actions sometimes being very wrong. This book is much more honest and tells both Allende's personal story, of why she left Chile, and of the recent history of the country as she understands it.
Most Subversive Book: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
This book managed to do both the thriller and the critique of science, which I don't think I've seen done before. The info-dumps served both to show us how this crazy island works, and to be used as action-fodder in the second half of the book when the whole system starts breaking down. Crichton did a great job with the characters too: I found myself being really annoyed at John Hammond and Lexie, and wanting to spend more time with Dr. Grant and Ellie. Getting your reader to root for the protagonist is surprisingly hard to do in thrillers a lot of the time.
Although the prognosis about genetic engineering hasn't aged that well (turns out it's really hard to do genetically engineer Eukaryotes on a large scale), the general prognosis about the scientific worldview has not. The park largely fails because of human hubris and inability to recognize the interests of other beings (humans or not). The inciting incident is directly caused by John Hammond being a dick, but as the ending shows, even if the dramatic events of the novel hadn't occurred, the park was already out of control. Trying to fight against nature is like trying to drink the ocean with a spoon. You ain't going to win, and you'll probably get very wet.
Best Book with Philosophy Book Club: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
I had been thinking about Kant to some degree or another since 2019 because one of my college teammates and friends, Matt Kearney, was really into his philosophy. I watched a couple YouTube videos on him at the time (one about Kingdom of Heaven, which I still remember), and remember loving the idea of the categorical imperative, but not understanding the motivation behind it.
Reading this for philosophy book club helped to clarify the motivation for why Kant formulated the categorical imperative in the first place. Kant’s whole philosophy is really about moral freedom. This is not really freedom in the colloquial sense, because the categorical imperative is pretty restrictive, but freedom from particular life circumstances that may bias or impede your moral judgement. In order to be a truly moral law, according to Kant, a law has to be universal, which means it cannot be affected by interest that may come from particular circumstances.
I can’t say I really understood the whole chain of reasoning clearly, but I find this philosophy admirable in certain sense, but very foolish in another. It’s pretty impossible to live like Kant would want us to: reason is not the pure and unbiased master that Kant seems to think it is, and I also unfortunately think that a lot of morality is extremely contingent, and would be difficult to writer a moral law describing (a very Buddhist idea perhaps).
Best Book Originally Written in Spanish: El matrimonio de los peces rojos by Guadalupe Nettel
This is a collection of short stories where Nettel uses an animal to reflect the personal relationships of the principles characters. It's a pretty small collection, only 5 stories, all of which are good. My favorite was "guerra en los basureros" which is about a boy living with his higher-class uncle and aunt who starts to identify with the cockroaches the family is insistent on eradicating.
Best Reread: Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
This was my fourth re-read of this book: I’ve read it every year since 2021 except for 2022. I’m getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective. McPherson tells a narrative history: focusing on the evolution of key players and key ideas in the struggle which made it easier for me to follow the course of the war. Of course I've had to use other resources to dig deeper into specific battles and theaters. There's also nothing here about the trans-Mississippi theater for example.
Best “Normie” Book: Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler
I picked this book up at the ‘Book Thing’ for free because the girl I was dating at the time recommended I read some Anne Tyler due to the fact that she sets her books in Baltimore, and I had said earlier I was starving for some fiction were set in this city in which I live that has such a negative reputation in fiction. Partially because I stopped seeing that girl, partially because this book is not my usual cup of tea, it took me nearly three months to finish this book. Searching for Caleb is a very slow book in which not much explicit plot really happens, but rather the family relations between the dysfunctional Pecks are explored in-depth. The plot which does happen is centered on the search for the eldest Peck’s younger brother Caleb, who ran away from Baltimore nearly fifty years ago, and the chaotic marriage of Justine and Duncan, who are cousins and both Pecks. I got what I wanted out of the book: an exploration of the Roland Park/JHU neighborhood of Baltimore as it was 50 years ago. In terms of theme, I got a bit more than I had hoped for as well. The advantage of Slice of Life is that we get to spend a lot of time with characters doing fairly normal things, without earth-shattering events that would tell us unrealistic things about their character. Much of the dsyfunction in the Peck family seems to stem from an inability to healthily grapple with change, but rather to run away at the first sign of difficulty. We see this quite literally in the character of Duncan, who can’t seem to stay put, causing his wife and daughter quite a bit of suffering. But the other Pecks suffer from this as well, the titular Caleb, but also the family as a whole, who by the novels end, seem to have retreated from the world, rather than confront the fact that they don’t live in the Belle Epoque anymore. Not sure if I will be reading more Anne Tyler but this was worth a read.
Most Disappointing Book: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
I reviewed this book in-depth earlier in the year after giving it a chance based on rave review from many friends. While Sanderson does some things extremely well: really cool vistas, excellent character set-up, and consistent book delivery, I found this book to be both plodding and shallow which is impressive given its thousand plus pages. There’s a decent, entertaining story hiding underneath all this bloat and superficiality, but it’s just not worth the time investment. Which is a shame, as I was expecting another First Law or A Song of Ice and Fire out of this.
Worst Book: Persona normal by Benito Taibo
We read this for Refold Spanish book club, and I think everyone who read it (just Nick and myself I think) had the same problems with it. The book starts well enough: Sebastian is a young Mexican kid who uses heavy amounts of magical realism to cope with the death of his parents while he’s living with his uncle Paco. Paco encourages this, and the two develop a very close friendship. Unfortunately, despite the great premise, the book quickly devolves into literary wanking and moral scolding: Taibo feels the need to constantly remind us how many Spanish greats he’s read, and how liberalism is the only sensible way of seeing the world. I had an extremely hard time getting through the last hundred pages of this, especially as the last 50 pages contain chapters about the COVID pandemic, which have aged really badly.
Full book list
The Children of Men was on my to-read list for this year, but in the end I deliberately decided not to read it. What did you make of it? How did it compare to the film adaptation (assuming you've seen it)?
This is what I wrote about it
The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.
Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.
Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.
The movie is pretty faithful but plays up the immigration (there are migrant laborers from poor countries to help with labor shortages) aspect a bit more for woke points.
On the book, I thought was just okay, 100/100 on premise and 45/100 on execution; the book has more fighting over control of the baby. For the movie, I watched it first was a teenager and absolutely loved it as an action flick, the scenes of urban warfare and the baby crying were powerful, 100/100. Watching the movie as an adult was an emotional gut punch; knowing couples who have struggles with fertility hits home in a raw way. The scenes on the prisoners I think predates our current migrant (fugees for refugees) crisis (but I probably wasn't paying attention) and I took more Holocaust vibes from it. The scene that sticks with me is an old Polish couple on the bus, and the man asking for food by meekly gesturing, and is ignored by all.
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Thanks for the review. It's on my bookshelf, I might give it a go in the new year.
It's a quick read. Took me a few days.
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