Sadly, I spent so much time reading theology books for The Albatross that my “fun” reading this year was severely reduced. I thus had to think hard, when deciding for this post which books I most enjoyed in 2014. The purpose, of course, is not to parade my reading, but to get readers to give their favorites in the comments so that we can all have things to add to our reading list. I’ll divide my favorites by category, but be aware that I’ve largely ignored most of the books that came out this year; these are simply my favorites among all the books I’ve read this year:
Favorite popular nonfiction: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown. Normally I wouldn’t have considered reading this book, for after all it’s about college rowing, something that never interested me. But when I visited my editor at Viking/Penguin in October, she handed me a copy (she edited the book) and told me to read it. If you know Wendy Wolf, you know a). not to take her literary advice lightly, and b). that you should do what she tells you. I’m very glad I did, for the book is a fantastic yarn about the University of Washington rowing team in the 30s, and how, against all odds, they won the 8-man race in the infamous “Hitler Olympics.” The story is woven around Joe Rantz, one of author Brown’s neighbors, from whom Brown coaxed (or coxed) the tale. Overcoming disease, poverty, and a dysfunctional family, Rantz showed amazing persistence that eventually brought him Olympic gold. But it’s much more than a personal story, for you learn how sculls are built, how rowers train, and you meet a bunch of colorful characters whose lives intersected at the final moment of victory. Read it; you won’t regret it. It’s a page-turner, the writing is absolutely superb, and the last page brought me to tears.
I’m not alone in this judgement: here are the Amazon rankings (it’s still #24 among all books although it was published last May):
Favorite “academic” nonfiction: I waded through a lot of ethics and theology this year, but one philosophy book stood out for its ability to provoke thought: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Rights, Restitutions, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (1986). Originally drawn to this book because of its discussion of the “trolley problem,” which Thomson popularized and which involves a Gedankenexperiment of the most profound sort, I was also absorbed by her essay defending abortion. Thomson is a master at inspiring thought by using concrete examples like the runaway trolley (her abortion examples are extremely clever), and it was largely because of this book that I realized that I was an ethical consequentialist. Regardless of how you feel about abortion, you’ll benefit from reading her chapter on that topic.
Favorite fiction: My fiction reading was especially light this year, perhaps because as I get older I find myself more interested in books that are true. But one novel stood out—a book that I read after I saw its movie adaptation. The movie, “Never Let Me Go,” about a dystopian future in which some children are raised to provide organs for ailing adults (and thus the children die after several “donations’), got mixed—though largely positive—reviews. But it moved me immensely, still haunts me, and I’ve seen it three times. Because of that, I read the book on which it was based: Kazuo Ishigiro’s eponymous novel published in 2005. It was even better than the movie. People are divided on Ishiguro and the movies made from his books, but I loved the only other work I read of his: The Remains of the Day, which was also made into a splendid movie that starred Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.
Best science book. I didn’t find one that excited me this year.
Biggest disappointment. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, was praised so widely, and sold so well, that I felt that I had to read it. And when I did so, I felt let down. While the book contained a lot of interesting information about how humans make judgements, how our brain works when so doing, and how we are subject to various delusions and logical inconsistencies, Kahneman’s prose was leaden, like that in an academic textbook. Reading it was like walking through quicksand. I found my attention straying as I waded through this ponderous tome, and experienced a strong sense of relief when I finished the last page. A good book should be a pleasure, not a duty. I suspect the book was a best seller because business people thought it would help them in their work (have you ever seen what’s on offer in an airport bookstore?). To me, this book seemed like the businessman’s equivalent of A Brief History of Time: a famous but largely unread book. I’m not alone in my assessment, either: a survey of which 2014 bestsellers remained unread, based on passages highlighted by Kindle readers, showed Kahneman’s book near the bottom.
Worst books: I waded through many books on religion and theology over the past two years, but the worst one I read in 2014 (besides everything written by Alvin Plantinga) was Reza Aslan’s No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. It’s a whitewash of Islam, with every bug of the faith transformed by Aslan into a feature. It’s also tendentious and, I think, intellectually dishonest. It was, of course, a bestseller, but many of these “make-nice-with-religion” books turn out that way. I’m sure that if I’d read Karen Armstrong’s new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, it would have been right down there with Aslan’s tome as a masterpiece of one-sided argument.
In the “worst science book” category, I’d put Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. Although Wade’s exposition on why races are “real” in a genetic sense was okay, the bulk of the book—an argument that the differences between modern human cultures rest largely on genetic differences instilled by natural selection—was tendentious and largely unsupported. It was an exercise in invidious speculation.
Your turn. You know what to do: list your own faves and disappointments in the comments. Remember, what you say will help others decide what to read at a time when there are so many books available that we must choose wisely.
Loved “to rise again at a decent hour” by Joshua Ferris, Pynchon’ latest, and Brock Clarke’s oddly timely “The Happiest People in the World.”
The best book I read this year, and will probably outstand for quite a while, was “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, by Yuval Harari, a young professor at the Hebrew University. It is brilliant, much in the style of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”. It will be released in the US this coming Feb, but is already available in the UK. Highly recommended.
I’m reading it now, in conjunction with Harari’s Coursera course, and agree. A standout.
I quite agree; I started it yesterday and I cannot move until I’ve finished all four hundred pages. Reductionist, funny, inspiring and true.
My copy of Sapiens just arrived this week.
Best fiction (no surprise, Pulitzer winner): The Goldfinch
I have a question. Should we take this rather weightless narrative at face value? Or is it (as it seemed to me) a fantasy concocted or dreamt by Theo?
I will have to put that one on my list. For some reason I thought I wouldn’t like it – maybe because it was so popular, which is a totally irrational reason.
Oh, I think that’s often a pretty good reason to be suspicious. 😉
I actually quite enjoyed it, it’s just that I couldn’t take it seriously as a narrative. As a meditation on Dickens and Dostoevsky however . . .
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Subsidise? OK, enough silliness, gotta get some reading done:-)
Ja
“Better Angels of our Nature.” One of the most consistently fascinating books I’ve ever read.
I also read that last year and agree with you. I’ve picked up a couple other Pinker books, but started reading “Guns, Germs and Steel”…another stand out.
I really enjoyed reading Jared Diamond’s G,G&S many years ago. I am not sure if his opinions about world history are considered to be rigorously demonstrated, but this non-historian thought his claims were interesting and plausible.
I think the details can be quibbled over, and it leaves one interesting question open – why Europe, not China? But the big picture is I think largely correct. (Disclosure: I am an outsider too.) The competing claims of simply racism or capitalism etc. have to explain why *those* versions were successful – why Cortez was so easily a winner in the conquest. (Part of this, though, has to be in the disaffected peoples he recruited temporarily to his side, which is often given short-stick.)
Yes, I loved G, G, and S as well. I also strongly recommend Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico. Written a long time ago; but a very good read. (Is a “but” really needed there?)
Too much attention can be paid to recent books at the expense of worthwhile older ones. At its worst, this can result in an old idea or premise or story being re-“discovered” and published as if for the first time.
A friend in England says that the mini-series of Wolf Hall is supposed to air over there soon. Damien Lewis as Henry VIII. Hope it comes here soon. (At least we’ll be able to tell the different he’s and Thomases apart…).
A simple filter for Fiction (works for me) is not bother with ANY work of fiction that is not in print (and hence commercially available somewhere, including “college” editions, reprints, and the like)) at least 50 years after the original publication. (Used bookstores don’t count.) Clears away a lot of dreck.
(Of course I make an exception for Robert Parker’s Spencer action detectives — I’m from Boston.)
But that means you might have to wait a long time! 😉
RE Parker–you & my husband! What do you think of the new author?
(We lived in Boston for 5 years…)
I second this, I also read his latest on language and that was very good too.
I too loved the book, “Never Let Me Go”, as well as “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, “Atonement”, and “The Particle at the End of the Universe”. Also “An Unquiet Mind”.
+1 on the Ishiguro book, though I read it a few years ago when it came out. I did not bother seeing the film because I assumed it would lose too much in the adaptation. Interestingly, I had just finished My Sister’s Keeper By Judy Picoult, which is also about a person born for the purpose of providing organs for another, who sues for the right to tell her parents no. Not quite the literary accomplishment of Ishiguro’s book, but together they make for an interesting meditation on the purpose and meaning of life.
Ishiguro’s a great writer. Don’t generally like dystopian novels, but this was pretty good. Remains of the Day is my favorite of his.
And that one did make an excellent film. Making a note to read the book – it got a lot of love on this thread!
I have often wondered about the ethics of having a baby to provide tissue to treat a disease in another child. It strikes me as a very dubious undertaking.
I enjoyed a work of historical fiction, The Master of Verona by David Blixt. David is an actor/director/author from Chicago. This is book one of four in which he pairs Shakespearean characters and plots with some of the real people and events. The book needs one more proof to fix a few typos and a bit of punctuation, but the storytelling is agile and exciting. It’s a fun read for fans of history and Shakespeare. There are many Easter eggs to find, but it’s a great pleasure even without a strong literary background.
I also enjoyed Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, a beautifully written novel about politics, music, language and love.
Michael Caine’s autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, was great fun as well.
Holowchak, M. Andrew (2014-11-11). “Thomas Jefferson: Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision”. Prometheus Books. Kindle Edition.
I found this book to be the most enlightening and intimate look at Jefferson than any “biography could be by plumbing the origins and depths of his personal philosophical and liberal views. If you want to know about a man, learn about his metaphysics.
In particular his views of science, reason, morality, and religion are fleshed out and stripped of the inconsistencies Jefferson is often framed with unfairly today.
I was moved by Jefferson and most of his philosophy. In the light of this book, his ideas and the thoughts behind them are not only still deserving of imitation, but much more credit than he is given today. Everything he did springs from his morality and he is still a good example of how to deal with religion, politics, free speech, and other problems we still wrestle with today.
“In particular his views of science, reason, morality, and religion are fleshed out and stripped of the inconsistencies Jefferson is often ”
That strikes me a little bit like apologists’ work to strip inconsistencies from the Bible. Doesn’t every human being have some inconsistencies? If you make them disappear, I’m not sure you have a real human being.
Most of impression of Jefferson was formed from reading the book “John Adams” and the memory I’m left with is that Jefferson, in many ways, didn’t live up to his ideals. Do any of us?
The book is apologetic in the sense that it clearly rebuts some of the more recent “revisionist” views but it does so with rigorous scholarship and appeals to real evidence that makes it difficult to reason otherwise. Evidence like this should appeal to readers of this site. Fist, is much more to Jefferson than what was written about him in one book, even if it was, “John Adams”. And second, this is a philosophical analysis; not a “biography”.
For example he overturns assertions that Jefferson was gripped by a fanatical and anarchistic cult of liberty which advocated liberty for its own sake and at all costs. Instead he convincingly demonstrates that Jefferson believed in liberty because it was required for human flourishing and happiness. It is also clearly demonstrated that while some claim Jefferson stuck mainly to an Epicurean philosophy or Jesus’ teachings of morality, it was his stoic sensibilities which usually trumped his thoughts and ruled his actions.
Also, appealing to readers of this site, this book sets the record straight on the founding fathers and a Christian nation as far as Jefferson is concerned. Even more appealing to readers of this site, the book also shows how Jefferson, consistent with his core values, altered a personal belief about god in light of the scientific evidence demonstrating animal extinctions.
Even the assertion that Jefferson did not live up to his ideals is explained by a genuine confidence in humanity springing from his unique philosophy which set him apart from his political peers of the day.
Anyway, I like this site, and I like this book very much. I do not think anyone here would consider it a waste of time.
Thank you — snagging it now. 🙂
There’s also a title by Holochak the previous year: “Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” -Prometheus Books (2013)
Best Non-Fiction:
Hollywood Censored, by Gregory D. Black. Describes how the Catholic Church managed to implement the infamous Hays Code in the 1930s. Engrossing read, and the main protagonists are wonderfully unpleasant, whoever likes anti-heroes needs not look farther.
Best fiction:
Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Cäsar, by Bertolt Brecht. An historical novel, treats the interweavement of politics and business, using Brecht’s estrangement effect by setting the plot in the Roman era.
Is that available in English translation?
Just had a look for you. Seems it isn’t, alas.
Just finishing Christianity Is Not Great, edited by John W. Loftus. This nearly 500 page event has several writers and it is all good and worth having. Even one very short chapter called – The Folly Of Faith, The Incompatibility of Science and Christianity, although this is very brief compared to what we have coming in a few months. It gives Jay Gould a good rap for his NOMA idea. But the book covers nearly every area you would think – from slaves, abuse of the sanctity of life, reproductive rights, abusive pastors and you get the idea. The hazardous to your health sections and the dark ages were very good.
On the more disappointing end was – The Meaning of Existence, by Edward O Wilson. Just okay but not great.
I’ll second Christianity Is Not Great. There were many angles I haven’t encountered yet. Reading the chapters about the Dark Aged makes me realize Christianity back then was all the things Christians hate about the Islam now.
The worst book I read was Randal Rausers book What On Earth Do We Know About Heaven. It read like a transcript of a five year old hopped up on Mountain Dew making up stories. No kidding, Rauser says everyone will get to spend a day with the real Jesus in Heaven. He does the math and figures with the number of Christians, that’s one day every 30,000 years. But since eternity is infinite, that’s an infinite amount of time you get. He doesn’t do the math of exponential growth though–can’t trust a Christian author with any form of science.
Funny that you should mention Loftus and Rauser in the same post. They are the two who go at it in a friendly and respectful way in God or Godless?: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions. It’s in debate format; each person posed 10 questions, discussed them, and then the other person responded. Superb book in showing that the arguments for christianity simply do not hold up; even most christians admit that Loftus had much the better of it.
That was a better showing for Rauser than the Heaven book. But that’s not saying much.
For sure. I kept thinking of the Loftus-Rauser debate as a 20-round fight. Rauser lost all 20 rounds, and in at least two, got knocked out,
My favourite science fiction novel was Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice about the last-surviving avatar of a spaceship seeking revenge on the hive-mind which betrayed her other selves; all this set against the background of a galactic empire in which gender no longer exists. Not sf for beginners but a damn good novel.
A ‘good thumping read’ would be Andy Wier’s The Martian about a stranded astronaut. I’d recommend it to fans of Apollo 13 and Gravity.
“Ancillary Justice” is a very good read. At first a little disconcerting because of the gender ambiguity of the characters, but once I got over that the story and environment well developed. I just started “Ancillary Sword”. I read “The Martian” on the recommendation of commenters on another thread a couple of weeks back. They were right, you can’t put it down.
I agree about The Martian. The best book I’ve read in a long time. I’ve recommended it to about a dozen people and they’ve all loved it too. I tell people to read the first page or two on Amazon (“Look Inside!”) and if they like it, they’ll like the book, because it’s VERY representative of the rest of it.
I’d put Cast Away in place of Gravity in your list though.
I’ll have to check out Ancillary Justice.
I checked out The Martian via “Look Inside!”, and I hope I’m not spoiling anything, but I found the premise very promising and engaging, but there were many technical details that were wrong about Mars travel. This is what often annoys me about some kinds of science fiction – lots of fiction, not enough science. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the thing is to just get into fiction mode and ignore technical issues the author can’t quite handle. Ya, ignore what I said. It’s just me.
This is a spoiler, but only of the first page or so. Still, SPOILER!
The biggest thing wrong scientifically is the dust storm, which wouldn’t be like that at all. The author has stated that he knew it was wrong, but couldn’t come up with anything he liked better and that worked as well dramatically. The rest of the book is very well researched, including flight times, flight windows, trajectories, equipment, etc. He had input from a lot of fans at NASA as he wrote it. (He originally published chapters online as he was writing, sort of like a beta for the book, and garnered many scientists as fans. They would offer input on his forum.) It’s accurate enough that recently a fan was able to correctly calculate the launch date of the mission (which is never stated in the book).
All that said, it’s a great read. It’s at least far more accurate than the way other professions are shown in books and movies.
A propos the scientific issues in The Martian, there is an interview with the author at this site. It is the first 54 minutes of a podcast. Pretty interesting; he stated flat out that he kept the sandstorm for dramatic reasons, even though he knows it is flawed as a scientific explanation.
A nice reader sent me a copy of The Martian, and I’m reading it now.
The Martian was my favorite fiction novel of 2014 too. I see several regulars beat me to the recommendation. Enjoy!
I have The Marian on my list after Diane G recommended it elsewhere.
I’m reading Ancillary Justice right now; about halfway through. I agree that it is definitely not for beginners. However, I now think I understand who the characters are, and the author’s use of grammatical ambiguity, so the rest should be easier to read. So far it’s pretty good, but I haven’t yet gotten to “great”.
Thanks for the heads up on Ancillary Sword.
Have you read any of Iaim M Banks Culture books. If you are a science fiction fan these are a must read.
Read all that I could this year well worth the time.
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I enjoyed the Martian. As an inorganic chemist, I was pretty impressed at the job he did on the chemistry – which was central to much the science of the book.
So glad to hear that! To me, the science sounded just fine, but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at some of those subjects. (My botany degree was perhaps helpful, however. 😀 ) I was encouraged by learning (as someone above stated) that there had been much scientific input during his writing process.
In addition to enjoying his humor & his scientific work-arounds, I really liked the inside look at the various departments of NASA, the JPL, etc. That sounded pretty believable as well
I went and got the Martian on the strength of your recommendation. I hope you realise the responsibility this entails! 😉
For those of us who love the book, please report back! (Even if you didn’t like it.)
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Favorite fiction reading last year (not necessarily published last year):
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (Favorite!)
Blindness, by José Saramago – Wow, loved this
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery – The movie is wonderful, too.
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
Euphoria, by Lily King (inspired by the life of Margaret Mead, though not a biographical novel, per se)
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler
The Goldfinch, by Donna Dartt
Pereira Maintains, by Antonio Tabucchi
The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson – Dark and not easy to read, but brilliant
Nonfiction:
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande
Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, by Patricia S. Churchland
Adding Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain to my list!
This one is remarkable also for the biographical details – PC seems to have grown up near a lot of good cases to turn someone into a neurophilosopher!
For Science, JC must not have read Kolbert’s “Sixth Extinction” else it would have been on his original list.
I should’ve put that on mine, too.
I’ve read several chapters of the Kolbert in the New Yorker, and plan to read the whole book soonish.
Just this minute finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent Bully Pulpit, about TEddy Roosevelt and Taft. Think I have already raved about Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson and Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos.
I enjoyed the Karen Joy Fowler a lot more than I expected to. The Luminaries, last year’s Booker winner, and The Narrow Road to the Far North ( this year’s) are both excellent. Have The Goldfinch lined up for soonish, as well. Currently reading a very amusing 1980 novel about the BBC during WWII: Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Also a very funny and poignant novel called
Mrs Queen Takes the Train, by Wm Kuhn. I’m not at all a royalist groupie, but one of my book groups was reading this and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
Oh, and have just begun Isaacson’s The Innovators.
Hands down, Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus. In addition to the historical information and analysis (which adds up to a big fat goose egg for the zombie virgin), it’s theology done right: an objective analysis of the beliefs of the authors in the context of the culture and religion of the time. That is, it doesn’t assume any sort of divine inspiration, but rather attempts to discern what the authors understood of what they thought was divine. That, of course, frees Richard from having to reconcile how there could be so many different and often-conflicting perspectives, and instead lets him try to figure out just what each was trying to put forward for himself.
b&
Easily at the top of the list of books I’ve read recently is Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” (already mentioned; in fact I think it might have been on this website that I first heard about it). Others I rate highly include Matthew Cobb’s “Eleven days in August”, Randall Monroe’s “What If” (though I expect that opinions on that one will be somewhat divided) and … er … not sure whether I should say this here … “Thinking Fast and Slow”.
I absolutely loved Thinking Fast… and devoured it, and I couldn’t be less interested in economics. I agree it wasn’t outstandingly written – he’s not a natural writer in the same way that Dawkins and Pinker are – but the exploration of the blindspots in my mind was fascinating.
“…he’s not a natural writer in the same way that Dawkins and Pinker and Coyne are”
FTFY. 😉
Oh, i really do not understand why Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is getting such a bad rap. I found it a real pleasure to read – full of lovely and easily understandable graphs, and much of the data are available online. Economists might find some of it a bit redundant or pedantic, but as a non-economist i appreciated the clear explanations, historical analyses, and simplified math. Plus, he even had some amusing little tidbits that one can easily share, e.g., the reference to that cartoon movie The Aristocats as demonstrative of the vast wealth accumulated by the upper class in Paris in the early 1900s (when the top 1% owned over 70% of the wealth). More importantly, i gained, i think, an understanding of how economies, populations, and policies can interact; and how essential it is to change some things. And it has excellent footnotes and a thorough index.
Likewise. And my best and worst are also about economics.
Best: Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, House of Debt. When I started reading this, I had the sense that the authors were over-simplifying their content. As I continued reading, I realized that this perception was simply a consequence of the authors’ talent for explanation.
Worst: Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality. Maybe if one were unfamiliar with the topics he addresses, you’d learn something. Otherwise, it’s just rambling polemic.
I’ve heard mainly good things about the Piketty. Got it on my Kindle.
Here are some reading highlights from my 2014:
“The Way To The West: Essays on the Central Plains” (Elliott West) — mesmerizing studies of how ecology, colonization, and weather played gigantic roles over eons in shaping the American West.
“The Memory Chalet” (Tony Judt) — autobiographical pieces written/dictated while the eminent author was dying prematurely from ALS; as probing and witty as his best able-bodied work, especially “Postwar”, his history of Europe in the wake of World War II.
“Berlin Diary” (William L. Shirer) — the journal kept by the eventual author of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, matchless for how it shows massive evil developing over years day by day.
“What Ever Happened To Orson Welles?” (Joseph McBride)– a lucid and cliché-smashing look at its subject, America’s and possibly the world’s finest filmmaker as well as an eminent figure in other areas of life as well.
“Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage” (Garner Simmons) — another great film artist (the director of the finest Western film, “The Wild Bunch” and the finest war film, “Cross of Iron”) vividly portrayed, plentiful warts and all.
Totally agree about Berlin Diary, one of my favorites.
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It being a year for World War I histories, I recommend Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Like everyone, I’ve long been baffled with how the hell that happened. Clark makes it as clear as it can be, and tragically so. There are just so many times and places where the path should have ended.
I’m currently reading a lot of Great War histories (because of the anniversary and because I’m going to Gallipoli for the ANZAC service on April 25). I’m currently rereading Peter FitzSimon’s ‘Gallipoli’ and Joan Beaumont’s ‘Broken Nation. Australians in the Great War’.
A film recommendation – Russell Crowe’s ‘the Water Diviner’ which is going to get a limited release in America in April. It’s a very moving film, albeit implausible.
Two books that might complement your reading. Despite his more populist tag, I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend Max Hastings’s “Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914”. I Despite having read about WW1 the events on August 1914 still stagger me in their sheer bloodiness ( the 22nd was the worst single day of the whole war for the Allies – 1 July 1916 including) and complexity. Complementing ( and frequently disagreeing with) Clark ( as well as being an easier but no less engrossing read) is Margaret MacMillan’s “The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War”. She takes a more traditional “Germany is to blame” stance than Clark but her research is no less thorough.
I, too, have always had trouble understanding the origins of this war, despite reading several histories of it. Last summer I read Liddell Hart’s 1930 History of the Great War (originally The Real War). The book is intense and heartbreaking. The stupidity and stubbornness of the generals is staggering.
I strongly recommend to you Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and also William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp.
I just finished “The Strangest Man – the hidden life of Paul Dirac”, Graham Farmelo. It is a very well written account of the odd personality of one of the 20th centuries most important scientific figures. Together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schopenhauer, and others, he founded the field of quantum mechanics.
Strange is the word. His youth and family life in Bristol in England was pretty bizarre. His father forced him to learn French with horrific forcefulness. He became chronically taciturn for the rest of his life. Among physicists all had favorite Dirac stories. His relationship with his mother and his wife are also bizarre. Only one equation appears in the book (guess which one), but the story of the advancement of theoretical physics is engagingly described. A very good read.
“2 + 2 = 4”?
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Now that’s one I could have tattooed on my chest. I think if you quantize that, it’s within an angstrom of the famous formula.
Hint: the name of the equation begins with the letter ‘D’.
Ah, but…
You mentioned physicists’ favourite stories about PD; this is mine: That as a lecturer he was notorious for not writing any equations on the blackboard. His students complained, and PD promised to do better, but continued much as before. Until the moment in a lecture when he said, “This is as easy as ‘2 + 2 = 4’”, and, remembering his promise, he turned around and scrawled it on the black board.
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Dirac was renowned for his concision, verbally. It has been said that his spoken vocabulary consisted of “Yes”, “No”, and “I don’t know”.
The Dirac’s only $3.66 on Kindle.
I read “The Strangest Man” a while back and thought it an excellent book. “Odd” is an understatement, but the guy was a genius.
Yes, the word genius should be used sparingly, but I would definitely apply it to Paul Dirac.
As odd as Paul Erdös?
I had not heard of him, though I’m not a mathematician. Many geniuses, just like the stereotype image, it seems, are odd. Grigori Perelman is a good example. Well, I’m sure that many have abnormal brains. Literally, structurally, abnormal. Some, certainly, give evidence of being, essentially, autistic savants to one degree or another. This is a strange but wonderful gift to the world.
Possibly apocryphal…sometime ago I read that some number of Cal Tech theoretical physicists had been determined to have Asperger’s syndrome.
By one of those coincidences that pop up so frequently when one has a sufficiently large pool of happenings to draw from, the same day that this was posted, I read a section from Crease and Mann’s The Second Creation (included in The World Treasury of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy) which talked about Dirac. I think you will appreciate this bit:
“Like many of the shy, smart people in that time and place. Dirac had violently colored political views; with passionately lofty detachment, he told his Continental colleagues that there was no reason for the poor to suffer, that he saw little purpose in rewarding the greedy with wealth, and that organized religion was a ludicrous sham. After one such disquisition, Wolfgang Pauli, who had mystical leanings, is supposed to have remarked, “Dirac has a new religion—there is no God, and Dirac is His prophet!”
That is priceless! 😀
I liked the movie Never Let Me Go. I know it it was good because I often think about it years after. I swear, the British do dire and apocalypse better than anyone else! I will put the book on my list (never even occurred to me there was a book version).
Here is my list for 2014. I didn’t feel disappointed with any of them though there were a couple that didn’t appeal to me as much as other works by the same other or had flaws that were unnecessary.
Non-Fiction
It seems my non-fiction this year was mostly about how human brains work or Russians. 🙂
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation – Matt Ridley
I liked it but found when the author inserts his own political view at the end, tedious and unnecessary. Everything else I liked and his explanations of Game Theory were especially good.
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight – M.E. Thomas
I liked reading something written from a sociopath’s perspective so that I can better understand how she processes information differently from me. I found it amusing that people complained she was full of herself. She is a sociopath people. Just listen to her story and how she tells it.
The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia – Angus Roxburgh
I love Angus Roxburgh’s work – he is an excellent writer and he elucidates his insider knowledge with panache. I felt sad when this book concluded and normally I’m not that enthralled with history books.
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body – Neil Shubin
Great book and I think Neil Shubin is a very clear writing that makes it easy to understand things others tend to complicate. I loved his description of the human hand the most and its essence and emotion has stayed with me months after reading the book.
The Second Russian Revolution – Angus Roxburgh
This is a companion book to a BBC series. I ordered it used from the UK as it is hard to get in Canada. As I’ve said about Roxburgh up a few paragraphs, he’s a great writer. He is a virtuoso at illuminating and demonstrating how copious amounts of information are interesting where many would simply rendered it all as dry facts. I really grew to respect Gorbachev and all he was able to accomplish after reading this book.
The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain – James Fallon
Happily, this book confirmed my suspicion of the whole nature vs nurture argument. It started off a little slow but you not only learn the personal story of the author but also good information about how human brains work. The explanation for why sociopaths exist has never left me: “at some point, don’t most people wish they could have their own mafia to mete out justice” and some of us may, from time to time, want our own personal enforcer”.
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey – Jill Bolte Taylor
More learning about human brains. I liked mostly understanding what it is like to be cut off from your left hemisphere and how she chose to ignore health care workers who were draining her energy but happily tried working with those who did not. It’s good to remember and I’ve used this in my own life to banish those that drain me.
Lying – Sam Harris
I especially liked the Appendices and this part: “The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle blowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.”
Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist – Christof Koch
More brain stuff that I found very easy to understand when Christof Koch explains it. I liked all the personal bits too and I found similes really amusing because I think we have the same taste in pop culture and pop music.
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion – Sam Harris
Some people were disappointed with this book but I liked it. I didn’t really learn anything all that new but Sam Harris puts things in a way that I couldn’t have articulated so well – especially how religion has co-opted a lot of things, like mediation and the non-religious then struggle with the practice because it’s hard to separate the two when looking into it.
Fiction
Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1) – Hilary Mantel
I liked the story (and how sad when TC lost his family due to illnesses in London) but the way it was written with all the Thomases and the “I” character being confused easily – I had a hard time reading it and thought I was getting soft in the head. Then I read that others had the same issue.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman
I had never read any Gaiman before. I was put off but the “fantasy” of it which was stupid of me because I absolutely loved this story. I was surprised that many read it as a lovely experience of childhood because I found it very dark. I love that you can read it as pure fantasy or as a man trying to explain traumatic events in his life through the eyes of a child. I chose to read it the latter way.
Dear Life: Stories – Alice Munro
I’m embarrassed to say that though I liked the stories and I liked the writing, I felt depressed reading these stories. It seems every story was tragic.
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse – John Joseph Adams
This is an anthology of apocalypse stories. Some good, some stupid. I cut myself off early from it because I couldn’t figure out why I felt so blah for weeks until I realized that constantly reading apocalyptic stories will do that to you. I stopped and read more Gaiman!
American Gods – Neil Gaiman
I was worried I would not like this story. I had only read one other Gaiman book (above) and this was a way bigger commitment being around 700 pages. I downloaded the Kindle version that was a special edition with audio interviews and introductions. I loved it. The gods in the story come to America with immigrants and start to lose power because people stop worshipping them. You follow the story through the main character, Shadow who you meet in jail. He meets up with Wednesday and it all goes from there. I knew who Wednesday was because of knowing the French name for Wednesday. 🙂
I really like Alice Munro, but her stories usually don’t end happily.
I thought it was all the he’s, not the I’s in Wolf Hall:-). ( and all the Thomases…)
Yes you’re right, it was all yhe he’s.
Can’t say I’m a big fan of Gaiman. I’ve read Neverwhere, Stardust, and American Gods, and I can’t say I found any of them enchanting or insightful. Too depressing, gory, and randomly unpredictable for me. And I mean unpredictable in the negative sense of seeming to make up the rules as he goes along, not in the sense of teeing up elements in ways that surprise but also make sense.
Different strokes…
You mentioned the three Gaiman books I’ve read..which is why I’m such a big fan of his!
I liked Lying also, but I was disappointed he didn’t walk through the arguments against lying in certain of the cases he alluded to – I was especially interested in hearing the case against lying to protect Ann Frank and her family in hiding.
«História da inquisição Portuguesa 1536-1821» from José Pedro Paiva Giuseppe Marcocci.
History of Portuguese inquisition. Nearly three centuries showing how effective religion is as a force for good.
Favourite nonfiction: “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin. Really an inspiring book. It’s made me look at myself and the world around me in a richer and more engaged light.
Worst book and biggest disappointment: “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I don’t know if I have ever read anyone so desperate to prove how exceptional he is. It was so obnoxiously written, with such impetuous disdain for any idea not claimed by the author himself (or by his bff Mandelbrot), with so much self-congratulations, that it took me a full 3 months to slog through the 400-ish pages as I had to keep putting it down to keep my blood pressure at a manageable level. Worst of all, the ideas Taleb puts forward are either completely banal or embarrassingly naive. It’s incredibly irresponsible popular science writing; he does a ridiculous hatchet job on several fields he remains proudly ignorant of. I don’t think a book has ever made me dislike an author more. I truly dread having to read his other works.
Agree on both Fish:-) and Swan:-(.
Agree with Fish, and appreciate the warning on Swan, which I had been thinking about reading.
People have complained that the movie version of “The Black Swan” wasn’t very faithful to the book.
Funny.
I actually liked The Black Swan, although I agree that the author is self-important and insufferable. But his message is powerful. Power law distributions and rare events influence things far out of proportion to our intuitions of the way things should be. It’s a dark tale — the future is unknowable and unpredictably malign. No remedy is suggested.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I only thought Shubin’s book was good, not great. The best parts to me were where he described the particulars of the discovery of Tiktaalic. As far as being a general introduction to evolution I think there are better books out there. The first book I’d recommend is our host’s own Why Evolution Is True. After that would be Donald Prothero’s Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.
I agree that Nicholas Wade’s book was terrible.
I’m not certain that racial differences are actually entirely due to natural selection. Many of the observable differences, which are largely external, can be explained by sexual selection or the founder effect.
Sandanavians are blond, blue-eyed and fair-haired because the small population of humans who migrated to Scandanavia after the end of the last glaciation just by chance happened to have these traits (the founder effect) and the rare dark skinned individual wasn’t seen as a desirable sexual mate (sexual selection).
I think that was a point made in Jared Diamond’s ‘the Third Chimpanzee’, which I’ve just noticed is available as a Kindle (I previously read it many years ago as on a carbon based data retrieval unit), so I’ll probably be buying it to reread (I lent my dead tree edition to someone and never got it back).
I also liked Jared Diamond’s recent ‘the World Until Yesterday’ and what Diamond has learnt fom ‘primitive’ societies he’s experienced in his lifetime.
Most of my ‘reading’ now is listening to audiobooks, so favourite listening of the year –
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Jo Nesbo – The Son
John McWhorter – Myths, Lies and Half-truths of Language Usage
Sebastian Faulkes – Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (I also both read and listened to a quantity of genuine Woodhouse as always)
Ned Beauman – Glow
Jonathan Meades – An Encyclopaedia of Myself
Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists
Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit
Dickens – Hard Times
Balzac – Cousin Bette
Balzac – Old Goriot
Peter Stamm – Unformed Landscape
Robert Harris – An Officer and a Spy
Piers Paul Read – The Dreyfus Affair
Hilary Mantel – The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Neil Bartlett – The Disappearance Boy
Richard Powers – Orfeo
Andrew Hodges – Alan Turing: The Enigma
Andrew Roberts – Napoleon A Life
and actual reading
Patricia Highsmith – Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith – The Price of salt
Nabokov – Pnin
Anthony Horowitz – The House of Silk
William Gibson – The Peripheral
Keigo Higashino – Malice
Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö – Complete Martin Beck series (first 5 much better than the last 5)
Lars Iyer – Wittgenstein jnr.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats
Judith Flanders – The Victorian City
Matthew Cobb – The Resistance
A friend has pointed out that the book I raved most about last year isn’t in this already-too-long list. That was Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant, she really was a marvellous writer.
> Complete Martin Beck series (first 5 much better than the last 5)
Yes, they get a bit pushy in their social criticism towards the later ones, aren’t they?
Bric, Is The Son new? Is it a Harry Hole book? If so, how do you compare it to the others? I found The Phantom not nearly as good as the previous ones in the series.
I liked Thinking Fast and Slow, to the point that I’ve read it through twice and gone back to it for chunks and chapters. It’s a wealth of information and case studies and useful terms and concepts, if not indispensable reading for those interested in cognitive science.
I won’t say it was a breeze to read through, but I didn’t have any particular difficulty with it either. I remember having more difficulty reading through Jared Diamond’s larger books such as Collapse, and even then I felt the heavy and sometimes unforgiving prose was more than compensated for by the lessons learned and histories explored.
Easily one of the best books I read was The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. The sections listing and explaining grammatical and other common errors and their rationales wasn’t as comprehensive as I would have liked, but the chapters leading up before that were so rich and informative that it outright excited me. Pinker’s always been a pleasure to read for me, though: his books are among the few that I read through as quickly and as eagerly as a gripping fiction book.
On that subject, I’ve been reading a load of Jeeves and Wooster stories. Initially, I was expecting something a lot more exaggeratedly clever and a lot more word play, puns, and literary devices than I got, and it was a touch disappointing. Once or twice, I was annoyed by a stance taken on vegetarianism and atheism, and after learning later this year about some immoral excesses of the rich and privileged, it is a little awkward to read an almost Eden-like depiction of innocent buffoons when you have a harsher reality at the back of your head. But apart from that, it was a blast. I wish I could have met Wodehouse in the flesh, because his writing has such a chummy, good-natured air of cultured elegance combined with self-deprecating informality that I could easily imagine myself thoroughly enjoying his company.
On the other hand, I also read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery out of curiosity, and I found it deeply, “spiritually” elitist and its characters almost entirely unsympathetic and self-absorbed. Now here is a book with leaden prose that you feel relief over when it finishes. It has occasional flashes of brilliance, and some of the secondary characters are interesting (or at least not easy to dislike), but it’s definitely a book I’m only reading once.
Worst book I read in 2014? I’m not sure, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog would give it a run for it’s money, but a couple of books I didn’t enjoy reading were translations of Virgil’s The Aeneid and most of the epistles (and two of the gospels, Mark and Luke) of the New Testament. I read them mostly to broaden my horizons about ancient literature, but it put me off the genre for months. They’re just so depressing, boring, and almost ridiculous that it was like an extreme form of culture shock (which it probably was). I forced myself to read virtually every page of the books, and I’m still not clear how much I actually gained from doing so. At least Hedgehog sometimes gave me food for thought, but these were slogs to get through. I think The Aeneid, on balance, was worse, because the New Testament books at least had educational value (in that they made me aware of how flaccid the origins of Christianity were), and as a result, I carried on to read the more lucid (and kind of more interesting) Philip Pullman take, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. But that’s not saying much.
I would recommend P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe; also bear in mind that the Jeeves stories are told by Bertie Wooster in his own style. You might want to try some of the Psmith and Blandings novels for another slant on Woodhouse – but they are intended as entertainment, not social commentary.
“but they are intended as entertainment, not social commentary.”
I know that much. It’s just a thought that crops up at the back of my mind sometimes, but I know the rich bachelor’s world of leisure is just backdrop, nowhere near social polemic disguised as literature. I do really enjoy the novels, for all that. Perhaps it even adds to them, subconsciously: I find the novels I like the most (The Code of the Woosters, Right Ho Jeeves, and Joy in the Morning) are the ones in which Bertie is really put through the meat-grinder. >:-D
I have A Sense of Style on my “too read” pile on my shelf. I probably will read it next after I finish reading Gaiman & Pratchett’s Good Omens. My friend said to me today that she had tears of joy starting it because she likes it so much. I dragged her to hear Steven Pinker talk about this book and grammar in October in Toronto and she really liked what he had to say.
Darn, I envy you. I’d love to attend one of Pinker’s talks, (I’ve read nearly all of his books and gone back to them loads of times), but I’m kind of limited when I’m stuck in the UK. 🙁
I said above I’m not a Neil Gaiman fan, but I did enjoy Good Omens a lot (then again, I am a big Terry Pratchett fan). Crawley and Aziraphale are easily the best characters in the book, but really, that’s like saying the best part of the cake is the cherry on top. You’re in for a treat with this one.
Yeah I’m about half way threw and it is a great book. Hilarious right from the beginning too. It would make a good TV series or movie.
Through not threw. Homophones!
Never suspected you of being homophonophobic before….
b&
I’m pretty sure you’ve called me that before. You just forgot. 🙂
Well, I’ve heard that it’s the mind that goes second. Anybody remember what goes first…?
b&
No Ben, I’m pretty sure Who’s on first.
Who the fuck are you?
b&
Ben, what goes first is the wine and beer, with the memory following closely behind. 🙂
Ah, yes — always forgetting to stock up, thus running out…of…what was it that I was supposed to get at the store…and which store…?
b&
I have read “The Remains of the Day” at least five times. There will be a sixth.
As always with “favorite book” threads, I’ve read the OP and every comment; few things I’d rather do than talk about books!
I didn’t even have to refer back to my reading journal to pick my favorites this year, as four books really stood out.
Non-fiction:
Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer
Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook
Fiction:
Declare by Tim Powers
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
I have the Carl Zimmer one on my list. That Pratchett one looks promising. I’ll add that.
While one does not have to read all of the Discworld books in order (I do, but that’s just me and my OCD), it is probably a good idea to read any given subseries in order. That said, you’d want to start the subseries “witches” with Equal Rites, and then read Wyrd Sisters. Both are amazing books, full of great good fun and humor on the surface, but with plenty of depth concerning equal rights for women. The only reason I didn’t list Equal Rites is because I read it in 2013, not 2014.
A guide to the suggested reading order for the Discworld novels is here.
I’ve read them all in order as they were published, since _The Colour of Magic_ came out when I was at university over 30 years ago…
/@
Thanks, I’ll read them in order (some day).
I read approximately 30 of the Discworld books in 2014, all for the first time (and many for the second, some the third as well). Pratchett and his publisher got nearly all my book money this year, so praise would be superfluous.
Thanks for the reading-order link, Mark; I’ve printed it to keep handy. Actually I don’t think, strictly speaking, it qualifies as even a partial order, but will be useful anyway.
Yes, I’m going to put that order on Evernote so I have it handy too.
Zimmer’s Parasite Rex and At the Water’s Edge are both excellent.
Stupid question: OP means original post?
That is correct (or at least, I hope it is, as that’s how I’ve been using it!).
Thanks, Mark. I’d wondered for a while and finally thought I’d figured it out.
Over the past 25 years I have read 8 books by ex-fundamentalists that combine critique with autobiography.
Last year I read one of the very best, Valerie Tarico’s “Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light”, a revised version of an earlier book of hers called “The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth”.
Interestingly, she is withholding about her current beliefs (she is a secular humanist) possibly in order to make the book accessible to as wide a readership as possible.
Best science book I read 2014:
Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe From Nothing”
An unusually gripping supernatural horror novel I read this past year was Richard Matheson’s “Hell House”.
A great new stage play I saw 2014 based on a recent novel: “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” based on the novel by Mark Haddon. It’s about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve the mystery of his neighbor’s dog’s death.
The Dog in the Night-Time was fantastic ! Did you see it live? I saw it broadcast Live in HD from the National Theatre in
London maybe a year ago.
Saw the theatrical broadcast from National Theatre
So you saw the same terrific actors I did ( “Ruth” from MU-5 as the mother). Some friends saw it live in NYC recently. Probably the same production, but with different actors. Wonderful grid on the floor.
Best book of the year:
“War: what is it good for?” by Ian Morris, a sort of sequel to his own “Why the west rules (for now)”, Gat’s “War in civilisation” and Pinker’s “Better Angels”. I’m a sucker for big picture history and this is a fine example of it. Hint: the answer is “quite a lot”.
Worst book (that I read) of the year:
“Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis, a 1992 novel which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, but was utterly dreadful. Leaden writing, slow, predictable storytelling and the characters are all idiots. Probably the worst novel I have ever read all the way to the end, even though I once read a Dan Brown.
Interesting; I had a similar reaction to the Connie Willis. I thought it might have been an excellent book if it had been half as long, as there was so much unnecessary repetition. If you’re interested in a much better science fiction novel set at the time of the black plague, try Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim. It was outstanding.
However, I’ve read books a *lot* worse than the Doomsday Book all the way through! Hers wasn’t even the worst novel (that I’ve read) to have won both the Hugo and the Nebula; that “honor” would have to go to David Brin’s Startide Rising, which was even longer than the Willis, and boooooooring.
I consider myself fortunate enough never to have read Dan Brown.
Hmm, I very much liked “Startide Rising”.
Well, once again, different strokes…
I also read his The Uplift War (as it also won the Hugo award), which was slightly less boring, but had a truly disappointing ending. Then I gave up on the Uplift books (my friend also put down Sundiver, unfinished).
However, I really did like his book Earth a lot.
You must have read a different “Doomsday Book” by another Connie Willis than I did. I’ll just leave it at that.
Have to agree, and add the other Oxford time travel books as faves (To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout and All Clear)
Perhaps this should be on ‘open threads’ rather than here but I find it hard to make time for books (thus no favorites in 2014) and was wondering how people manage to do it and how the many different platforms make it work for them personally. Personally I’ve only been able to do essays and long reads.
I was thinking much the same. How do some of these people have time to pee?
This is where audiobooks score really high
I love the idea of audio books but they seldom work for me…sooner or later my mind will wander, I’ll miss a section, and then it gets tedious…
They only work for me when we’re on a long road trip.
I make reading a priority. Step #1, of course, is I never watch TV. Step #2 is to tear myself away from the computer.
As for platforms, as Wayne Robinson remarked in #25 above, I mostly use carbon based data retrieval units. However, I do have something in my Kindle application, and something in iBooks for when I get stuck in line, or am waiting for someone. But that is less than 10% of the books I read each year.
“I make reading a priority. Step #1, of course, is I never watch TV. Step #2 is to tear myself away from the computer.”
Exactly.
Except, of course, when a great science website is running a thread about which books people have been reading!
I read s little bit at night. Even if it’s just a few pages. Sometimes I also have the audio book for commuting but mostly I just read at night. I’m a slow reader so it takes me a while.
Then…I’ll…be…sure…to..type……especially……slowly…for…you….
…b…&…
I know what you mean. When i was working there was very little time for anything else. There just wasn’t any extra time after ever-expanding work, chores, child and pet care, family obligations, etc. Reading consisted mainly of papers related to work (luckily in science). What changed? Retirement! Now I have much more time for reading in all kinds of subjects. So you have that to look forward to, i hope. Have to warn you, though: your book list just gets longer and longer.
I never watch TV and limit internets time to very little.
Looking over the books I read in 2014, I think my favourites are:
Non-fiction:
Thank you for service by David Finkel. Follow up to his also excellent Good Soldiers about a battalion in Iraq, this follows some of them as they are back in the US. Very good writing, very good journalism.
Fiction:
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson. A really good debut novel about a social worker in Montana in 1979-1981 or so, who hasn’t quite got his own life on the rails when he gets involved with a feral boy and bis survivalist father. Great writing.
I read “Foundation, The history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors” very interesting and full of stuff about kings you don’t normally hear about. Steve Pinker’s “A Sense of Style” was very good, and I really enjoyed “The Bible Unearthed” by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. A lot of good stuff about how Israel happened and the old testament got written. “The Mind of the Raven” by Bernd Heinrich was also interesting and well written, recommended for those who are interested in these amazing birds, ie most of the habitues of this blo-webpage. “Just My Type” but Simon Garfield was fascinating and entertaining.
Fiction: “The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man” by W Bruce Cameron, was a murder mystery with a difference, and both of Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling)’s murder mysteries are fantastic! It was a difficult year for me, and I read rather more light fiction than I normally would, but most of it was pretty terrible, these two were not.
I also enjoyed the Galbraith books a lot, and the way they’re almost but not completely unlike Harry Potter adds something to the reading experience. I don’t do murder mysteries much, with the exception of Val McDermid (there are a couple of hers I haven’t caught up with yet) so that’s the comparison that comes to mind; McDermid’s excellent and has been in the business a long time, but I’m not sure that any two of her books are as good as JK’s first throw at the genre. It must be bloody annoying.
Best Science Book: Patel’s splendid ‘Music, Language & the Brain’, by a man who understands and respects the arts and is not locked into the ‘two cultures’ quarrel, as, alas, some scientists seem to be (as of course certain people in the arts are).
Best Novel: ‘The Radetzky March’ by the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, in Michael Hofmann’s good translation – a beautiful and unsparing description of the years leading up to the First World War and the collapse of the Austrian Empire, made through an account of three generations of a military family; this really is one of the great novels of the last century.
Literary criticism/biography: Mark Thompson’s ‘Birth Certificate: The story of Danilo Kis’ – Kis was a partly Jewish Yugoslav writer of Jewish extraction (his Jewish father was murdered in a death camp), and the author of some extraordinary and disturbing novels and short stories (‘A Tomb for Boris Davidovich’ is darkly brilliant collection); Thompson’s ‘biography’ is beautifully written, structured in an unusual and imaginative way, and does justice to Kis and his work.
Criticism: ‘Opera as Drama’, by Joseph Kiernan, a book that I hadn’t read before (it was published years ago); it is very well argued and perceptive (even if one doesn’t agree with everything proposed), and gives the lie to the prejudice that anything to do with arts is ‘subjective’ and arbitrary and all a matter of taste (so that there is no possibility of distinguishing in terms of quality between, say, Mozart and Andrew Lloyd-Webber, and a preference for the former derives from mere snobbery).
Philosophy: Bernard Williams’s exhilarating ‘Shame & Necessity’, ‘Ethics & the Limits of Philosophy’, and ‘Truth & Truthfulness’. Williams writes beautifully, and his arguments are subtle and stimulating. His work shows why philosophy is important.
Marius Kociewoski’s ‘God’s Zoo’, a collection of conversations with a number of exiled or emigre writers, artists and musicians, living in London and originally from, among many other places, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, China and Hungary; the conversations are both harrowing and fascinating – both in the light they throw on different corners of the world and in the insights they give into various artists’ minds.
Waste of time & money: the poet Robert Hass’s colloquy with Edmund O. Wilson, ‘The Poetic Species’. All a little too ‘feel-good’, in my opinion, and nothing eye-opening ever said.
That’ll do!
Oh, no it won’t! There is Stephen Oppenheimer’s ‘The Origins of the British’, in which he shows that two-thirds of the English people are in ‘an unbroken line of genetic descent from south-western Europeans arriving long before the first farmers’, with most of the remaining third derive from settlers arriving between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago from north-western Europe, particularly Scandinavia. The Celts mostly arrived from Ice Age refuges in the Basque country. There was therefore no Anglo-Saxon genocide of the Celts, and also Oppenheimer draws on the work of linguists, literary scholars and archaeologists to suggest that English is more closely related to the Scandinavian languages, and does not really belong in the West Germanic group.
and sorry about the ‘partly Jewish writer of Jewish extraction’ – I forgot to cancel one or other of the descriptions…
That reminded me of a line by Dr Jonathan Miller (quoted by Pinker somewhere).
love it!
What a great list. I’m adding Music, Language & the Brain and Opera as Drama
Been meaning to get to my copy of Radetzsky March for eons. Opera as Drama sounds good.
Absolute worst was David Bentley Hart’s “Experience of God” book. It took me six months to wade through that nauseating drivel.
What made you continue wading?
I’m so bookmarking (ha!) this thread!
Hi Jerry,
I go straight to the science book: “The Forest Unseen”, by David Haskell. One of the most exquisitely written, most informative and most thought-provoking books I’ve ever come across. No surprise it won many awards and was a Pulitzer finalist. If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it. There’s a lot about evolution to be gathered from just a meter square of forest floor!
As for the other categories,
“Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air” by Richard Holmes was the best nonfiction I read this year. A wonderful book, and his previous “The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science” is even better
As for fiction, American Gods by Neil Gaiman is simply wonderful, and behind the narrative surface it’s more irreverent towards religion and human superstition that many readers seem to have realized
I think you get enough academic reads already
Cheers
-wsa
Yes, The Forest Unseen was fantastic! I read it slowly over a year. Haskell has a great website, too.
This was a busy year for me so I didn’t get many books read but here’s the list anyway.
Best fiction: To Kill a Mockingbird. I know it’s not new but it’s the first time I read it. Just incredible.
Worst fiction: the Divergent series. I know young adult is a little less sophisticated than most readers here, but I like it. This series however was bad. The first book was okay but went downhill from there. I read an interview after I read the books where Roth came out and said she didn’t have the full story in mind when started writing the first book. It’s no wonder the rest of the trilogy fell apart.
Runner-up worst fiction: Wuthering Heights. It’s a slog with no likable characters.
Best non-fiction (sort of): New Oxford Annotated Bible. Not for the Bible parts but for all the footnotes and explanation.
Because you admit you like some YA, let me mention Michael Adams’ ‘The Last Girl’ and ‘The Last Shot’ (there’s another – promised to be final – volume due out soon). I thought it was a pretty good story (so far) and well written; also it’s set in and around my home city where I haven’t lived for fifteen years, so it’s nice to go back even if nearly everyone’s – oops, spoiler!
…my city got me thinking of this (which references this, which now reminds me of Carl Sagan…;) )
My two best fiction are Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (especially great for New Yorkers) and The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (especially great for Jews, fans of Philip Roth, or anyone with an opinion of the Israel-Palestine conflict – though it isn’t about that).
Under best science book, I might put Philip Ball’s Serving the Reich: the struggle for the soul of physics under Hitler. I’ve read many discussions of this general topic, but this is perhaps the best; it focuses on Planck, Heisenberg, and Debye but is broader than those three. It was one of six books on the short-list for the 2014 Royal Society Science Book Prize. Here is a brief review that gives a notion of what the book is about http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2014/10/31/book-3-serving-the-reich-the-struggle-for-the-soul-of-physics-under-hitler
BTW, Ball is one of the best science writers in the world today – I’d say he is the very best among those on the physical sciences side (his background is in chemical physics), and anything he writes is worth a look.
Sounds like a compelling read. The Dirac book I submitted brushed on this subject. He was a defender of Heisenberg and Schopenhauer even though they were accused of collaboration.
The best part is — he not only announces the best he had read but also the worst he had read. I like the style, :))).
It’s been a particularly light year on the fiction front for me. I did have high hopes on a collaboration between Greg Benford and Larry Niven, “Bowl of Heaven.” Sadly, despite it arriving in October, I still haven’t finished it.
There are a couple of Charlie Stross sitting under it on the bedside bookshelf. But I’ve got to get through the Benford-Niven before I can open them.
Then there’s that Russian paper on the formation of the Yamal potholes. That hasn’t convinced me, but I need to get my criticisms into order for the authors to respond to.
Melted pingo, methane explosion or something else? – Do tell (if you may)!
Oh dear, the Amazon reviews for Bowl of Heaven are not encouraging. Timescape and (in part) Ringworld were fantastic, but the only other Benford I’ve read (Cosm) recycled a lot of plot, character and dialogue from TS so I haven’t gone back. I’d maybe at some point read more by Niven and Pournelle (after The Mote in God’s Eye and Inferno) but I really don’t like Niven in his own voice, being his own biggest fan (still denying climate change? pfft, last thing of his I read, he was denying that CFCs affected ozone)
What to say about Timescape? It was one of the best reads qua reads I’ve ever experienced; heck, I read the whole 500 pages in three days. However, the idea behind it (I won’t spoil it here) was so, shall we say, tinted by passing through rose-colored glasses, that it just set my teeth on edge. Along with (for obvious reasons) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it’s the book I’ve dropped the furthest in my personal ratings because of the philosophy behind what the author said.
I loved Ringworld, but the sequel was kind of meh, and I stopped reading the series there.
For a long time, most time-travel stories either treated it as a magic box for moving the story along, or focused on the problems and curiosities of paradox. The other day I was reading some fairly smart discussion of T-T in fiction including the Terminator and Back To The Future series, which pointed out that the only non-paradoxical and physically quasi-plausible (but still dramatic) narratives involving TT are those involving the establishment of a stable time-loop; one possible future goes to shit but is able to send a message (or messenger) back to ‘save’ a better alternative which becomes ‘real’ in its place, and can never lead to the bad version.
This is what we get in the Termie & BTTF movies (and in Timescape, and in To Say Nothing of the Dog); if TT works like this, the spacetime continuum evolves in meta-time towards a better and better state (which may ultimately lack any mechanism for time-travel, after its job is done), due to choices made by privileged protagonists with access to the enabling technology.
I get that you hate the optimism of this storyline (if I understand what you wrote), but it can still be made pretty interesting and multilayered in diverse ways. I also think it’s a good analogy for what consciousness does all the time (without breaking any physical laws), by imagining alternative futures and giving them causal roles in the present.
The alternatives to the ’emerging stable-time-loop’ story (which converges to a closed cycle attractor) are radically divergent or chaotic trajectories with no emergent reality principle over multiple universes, which may seem more plausible from a physical, or more interesting (sometimes) from a narrative point of view, but they’re obviously harder to achieve without descent into tragedy and madness (Niven’s story All the Myriad Ways).
Very interesting; thanks! May I ask where you read this discussion?
We might call this the “opposite of the Sound of Thunder effect”. I like what you (or the author of the article) said about the effects of consciousness.
You correctly perceived my natural antipathy to optimism. That said, there are stories in time travel evolves to create a situation without time travel, as you mentioned; Asimov’s The End of Eternity is a good example. And others where the time travel creates the situation in which time travel is possible, such as Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps or P. Schuyler Miller’s As Never Was. I guess what is needed is a taxonomy of time travel themes!
I forget where it started by I passed through here [WARNING – TV Tropes link].
Borked link should be this.
(Got distracted by this new concept in ecology, laughed myself stupid).
The macrobiome one is hilarious! Poor wolf, though…
Well the Russian have suggested that the Yamal potholes are the product of some convoluted scour process under an ice-covered periglacial lake. But between my wife’s translation of the Russian in to non-technical English, and their own severely fractured-English version, it’s hard to work out exactly what they’re saying. It has the form of serious work, but there’s a sniff of “this is my idea and I’m very proud of it” there too. And a very, very broad range of interests for the posters on ResearchGate, which is a bit suspect too.
I’m going to have to try reading it again. When my headache clears from the last time.
Managed to finish the Bowl of Heaven book just now … and after a fairly turgid and repetitive block from about page 120 to 300-odd, the last 50 pages have picked up considerably. I’m surprised the pages don’t still have blue pencil on them (if that’s what editors still use). Considering the second volume. But I think I’ll open the Charlie Stross first – I’ve earned it.
Which Stross books? I loved Accelerando (although my friend hated it); I thought Glasshouse was OK, but none too memorable. I have some others, but haven’t gotten to them yet.
I was dubious about Stross when I first met him (as an author – I met him as a nerd at EdLUG on a couple of occasions before I knew he was an author) but my trigger point was “Iron Sunrise”, when I realized that this was someone who did have a working knowledge of nucleosynthesis (which I’d been boning up on in the recent past because of some twit of a creationist), and who could manufacture a plot involving both FTL travel and an entity that bans time travel.
The “Merchant Princes” saga is a rollicking parallel-universes romp. Lightweight tosh, but well done. Strictly allowing only a couple of changes to the laws of physics, then working out the consequences.
“Rule 34” – enough said. By that time, Stross was on my regular buying list at airports etc.
Cool. I have Iron Sunrise, and will move it up the list. Thanks!
I, too, recently read “The Boys in the Boat,” which I won at the silent auction for WeCanRow, the rowing club for women who have had breast cancer (there are branches around the country, so if you know anyone interested, let them know such a thing exists). Reading what the Pacific Northwest was like during the depression and Joe’s trials growing up was wrenching. A fantastically well researched and written book.
Some other books I greatly enjoyed and/or learned from last year:
Fiction: “The Blue Flower” by Penelope Fitzgerald; “The Siege of Krishnapur” by J.G. Farrell; “Binocular Vision” by Edith Pearlman
Nonfiction: “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” by Charles M. Blow; “Little Failure” by Gary Shteyngart; “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” by Ann Patchett
Isn’t J.G. Farrell great? Loved Krishnapur and Troubles. Have yet to read the Singapore one.
For some reason I did not like Fitzgerald’s Blue Flower, but have liked others of hers.
I need to look for the Charles Blow one. I love his NYT columns.
I haven’t read the other Farrell books, but plan to. The Blue Flower: I can’t say I completely understood it, but I thought it was such an interesting idea for a novel, and she made it come alive for me. But it was the form more than the substance I found fascinating. Blow took me into a world I had an inkling but no real knowledge of. I think he’s probably a genius, and to read how he got to where he is physically and in his mind was terrifying: completely, totally against the odds. The talent we waste and the suffering we allow to occur in this country is tragic.
I just ordered the Blow book on Kindle. Know nothing about him except what I’ve read in his columns
If you like his columns, you’ll appreciate what he tells you in this memoir.
An excerpt was published in the NYT a while ago…Sunday Review section, I believe. It was powerful.
I’m looking forward to it.
Best:
Contact by Sagan (I hadn’t read the book)
The Innovators by Walter Isaccson. Another great one by Isaacson. Great until he starts talking about bloggers and the online community (sorry Jerry!) 🙂
Rise Up Singing This is a song book by Pete Seeger (will likely have limited appeal)
The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby. Read it for about the third time. Anything by Newby, pretty much. (Also A Small Place in Italy this year.)
Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini. A classic adventure novel. Read it for the third time (at least).
Canoeing With the Cree by Eric Sevareid. Thought he was just a broadcaster? This is the story of how he and one high school friend paddled a canoe unsupported from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay in the summer after they graduated from high school. Wonderful story and well written.
rumoours of glory, the memoir of Bruce Cockburn. Well written and great for any Cockburn fan. Released fall of 2014.
Six Frigates by Ian Toll – the founding of the US Navy.
Shakespear by Bill Bryson (also his At Home)
Worst:
I too tried to read Aslan’s book. Whoa, I’m getting nauseated thinking about it …
1491 Too biased a polemic to balance with the good info on pre-Columbian Americas.
Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks, great concept, meh execution.
Among the Mountains by Wilfred Thesiger. I love almost anything by Thesiger, especially Arabian Sands (highest recommendation); but this one was just dull. Almost a laundry list lifted straight from a diary.
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. Great while recounting history. Deadening polemic as soon as he gets to the miracle of Thatcherism.
As I said I actually enjoyed Thinking Fast… and like Jerry I don’t read much non-fiction.
The one non-fiction book that I don’t think too many people’ll have read, although definitely not from last year, was ‘Augustus Carp Esq, By Himself – Being The Autobiography Of A Really Good Man’. A very funny faux diary of an avid, pompous, sanctimonious ‘Xtian’ man, written anonymously in, I think, the ’30s. Genuinely funny, snide, mean, not in the slightest bit dated. Worth tracking down.
I read Never Let Go too. Very good.
Non-fiction is almost exclusively books on physics but there weren’t that many interesting new ones except for Max Tegmark’s bitty book on his fascinating ideas, which are pretty much as mental as a mainstream physicist can allow them to be. ‘Our Mathematical Universe’ it was called.
The best non-fiction books I read were ‘The Better Angels…’, which was utterly, relentlessly fascinating and frankly quite encouraging about things in general, ‘Atheism: The Case Against God’ by George H. Smith, the best philosophical critique of theism that I’ve ever read by a comfortable distance, and ‘The Beginning Of Infinity’ by David Deutsch, which was maybe not as brilliant as his first book but still contained more ideas in a single chapter than most authors manage in an entire career. Oh and ‘From Eternity To Here’ by this website’s official physicist.
Best “gotta digest this one repeatedly” book (NF) – _The Ethical Project_, by Kitcher. (I may have gotten this one earlier, but I did reread this last year too.)
I didn’t read too much fiction last year, so nothing stands out – but just last weekend I read some of _The Laundry Files_ series (by Charles Stross). Wacky and reasonably fun, though if one isn’t both a computing person and a HP Lovecraft fan you might miss something. (I also think I likely missed a lot of the jokes in one of them having never been much into James Bond, either.)
“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr (mentioned upthread also) was among my favorite fiction reads for 2014. Several of the characters seemed so real, sympathetic, and fascinating (I challenge other readers to avoid falling in love with a couple of them), and I instantly became enmeshed in the plot and beautiful prose. Other fiction favorites were Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” and China Mieville’s “Railsea.”
I listed to the audiobook for Barbara KIngsolver’s “Flight Behavior,” which I enjoyed in many respects, but also found disappointing. Much of it is just too precious and stickily sweet, and I couldn’t relate to the characters easily.
My non-fiction favorite was Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.” I don’t think I can adequately express how much this book helped me in preparing mentally for my first half-marathon, and in sticking with (often extremely frustrating) triathlon training. Other non-fiction books that I really enjoyed were Tim Birkhead’s “Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird” (because I’m not actually an owl), and two oldies-but-goodies, John Muir’s “The Yosemite” and Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast.” I read latter two books in preparation for my one and only out-of-state trip of 2014.
I was moved and harrowed in turns by Colin McCabe’s wonderful book about our relationship with our nearest primate cousins, A Beautiful Truth. More uplifting, and this time an account of one person’s relationship with a truly wild animal and nature in general, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. Both available in the UK. And I’m looking forward to reading Whitehead and Rendell’s The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, extremely well reviewed.