Just as I did in 2012, I set myself a goal in 2013 of reading 30 books over the course of the year. And just like in 2012, I did not meet my goal. I did, however, come damn close: I read 29. I actually would have met my goal if, last week, instead of choosing to start a 500+ page book, I opted for something in the 200-300 page range. But alas, my readerly muse felt the call towards Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and so I fell one book short this year.
Oh well. There’s always next year.
Here’s the list of books I read in 2013, plus a little blurb of what I thought of each of them. Enjoy.
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years
My wife and I started this as an audiobook a couple of years ago during a drive from Chicago back to Vermont, but it’s a long-ass book, so even though the drive took 14 hours, we didn’t get to the end of it. I should have just bought the book as soon as we got back, but I convinced myself that I’d finish the audiobook sometime, plus I didn’t want to pay for the book twice. A couple of years went by, and I didn’t make any progress with it, but so much of the book stuck with me that finally, I said, “Fuck it,” bought the book, and started from the beginning.The gist of Debt is that it’s an anthropologist’s look at the history of money, and because it’s an anthropologist as opposed to an economist, this story of money actually uses such a crazy thing as evidence from actual history to support its theories. I highly recommend this book. It’s filled with fascinating concepts and anecdotes, and it explores everything from how arguments about debt arrange the hierarchies in society to the way it molds our very ideas of right and wrong. Definitely check it out. - Habibi
A beautifully rendered graphic novel that covers the heartbreaking life and love of a girl and her adopted charge in a mythic (and heavily orientalist in the Edward Said sense) Arab country. The artist, Craig Thompson, uses the design of Arabic writing as a visual theme as he weaves his epic plot through the Qur’an and other Arabic texts. It’s also incredibly and visually sexual (the main character becomes a renowned prostitute), so I don’t recommend it for younger readers. - The Shores of Tripoli
This Kindle Single is the product of first-hand reporting by Marc Herman, who covered the Libyan revolution for The Atlantic. It’s an in-depth look at three individuals who joined the revolution and what they went through. I read it because I paid little-to-no attention to the revolution as it was happening, and this seemed like the best way to learn about it. - Gilgamesh: A New English Version
I’d read Gilgamesh before as part of my graduate work, comparing John Gardner’s translation to this one by Stephen Mitchell, so when one of my high school students said she wanted to read an ancient epic — any ancient epic — I suggested Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh, which tells the story in a colorful (and compared to Gardner’s, complete) way. As before, I thoroughly enjoyed the tale. - Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence
An intellectual history of computers, Darwin Among the Machines was an interesting book that doesn’t quite live up to its title. There wasn’t a whole lot in it that I hadn’t read before, but if you’re new to the concept of artificial intelligence, it’s a good place to go for the big picture view of that art form’s development. - Blankets
Another graphic novel, also created by Craig Thompson, that, frankly, did not come close to matching the expectations set by Habibi. To be fair, Thompson put together Blankets long before Habibi, so it probably doesn’t make sense for me to expect it to be as good as the later work, but even so, Blankets was pretty emo, and that kind of stuff never resonates with me. I just don’t go in for stories about the inner turmoil of teenage drama. - Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
This was another book that wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped it’d be, though I did learn a lot about individuals and movements that are basically kept out of our history books. This isn’t a book about how atheist’s shaped America; instead, it’s about how freethinkers ensured that the promise of America would be available to everyone, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. - Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II
The Second Vatican Council is a watershed moment in modern Catholicism — it’s actually the very definition of modern Catholicism — and yet, despite having grown up in a Catholic world shaped by that definition, I realized I knew very little about the actual council itself. Keys to the Council provides a nice blend of journalistic reporting, original documentation, and theological exposition, giving readers an easy pathway into the documents and decisions created by Pope John XXII’s historic council. - The Earthsea Cycle
Comprised of five books, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind, the Earthsea Cycle is Ursula K. LeGuin’s entry in the list of the best all-time fantasy cycles (which would have to include Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Dune, and others). The cycle can actually be broken up into two different trilogies (kind of). The first three books follow Ged, a legendary wizard, as he becomes legendary, earns his legend, and leaves it behind. The second three books, written over a decade after the others, are quieter books where the day to day operations of Earthsea take on more focus (while, of course, not leaving behind the need for adventure and plot). Between this cycle and the next group of books on the list, my reading this summer remained light and fun. - The Patternmaster Series
After knocking out LeGuin’s Earthsea, I went looking for another series I could tackle. I’d read Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed many moons ago, and I remembered that it was just one book in a bigger series, so I decided to give the whole series a shot. The four books are now published with numbers attached (i.e., Wild Seed: Patternmaster #1), where the numbers correspond to the chronology of the world, but I decided to read them in the order they were published, which I definitely recommend. The four books I read were (in the order I read them) Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Wild Seed (again), and Clay’s Ark. Apparently, there’s a fifth book in the series too, but Butler renounced it later and refused to let it be republished. Since she didn’t dig on it, I decided not to go looking for it.The books themselves tell the story of the next stage of human evolution (which is just one way to put it). The first book (in the order I read them) takes place way in the future when telepaths have conquered the world, but when they are also all subservient to the Patternmaster, who is kind of the king of the telepaths. The second book takes us back to the near-future (from now) when the telepaths are all collected (and bred) by a strange and dangerous immortal; it’s basically the creation story of the first Patternmaster. The third book goes back to colonial times to weave a semi-origin story of the immortal; and the fourth book, Clay’s Ark, which takes place after the second book but before the first book, fills in the remaining gap in Butler’s vision of the future, explaining the origin of the strange race of humanoids who terrorize the telepathic race in the Patternmaster. All in all, it’s a weird but fun series. - The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision
This was another book that left me slightly disappointed. The book is broken into four chapters that try to cover the latest research in vision. The first chapter, “Color Telepathy,” argues that our ability to see in color evolved because of our skin (“understanding the color powers of skin is crucial to understanding that color vision is meant to see skin…, and in particular is meant for sensing moods, emotions, and other physiological states”). The second chapter, “X-Ray Vision,” explains why most creatures have two (or more) eyes and examines the difference between having eyes on the side of your head versus on the front of your head. The third chapter, “Future Seeing,” uses optical illusions to explain that perception is based on prediction (i.e., what we see is not reality, but what we think reality is about to become). And the final chapter, “Spirit Reading,” argues that “the special trick behind [written language] is that human visual signs have evolved to look like nature. Why? Because nature is what we have evolved over millions of years to be good at seeing.” The book is written well (and can even be funny at times), but after an incredible first chapter and strong second chapter, each of which changed my understanding of one aspect of our vision, the book went off into areas that didn’t really capture my interest. The “Future Seeing” chapter, while somewhat intriguing in the abstract, felt a bit plodding, as if the author was trying to make a point against people who were already arguing against him rather than trying to explain the idea to a new audience; and the final chapter, which should have been right up my alley, just didn’t feel very convincing. - Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
I read an excerpt of this somewhere on the web, and it totally hooked me, so I decided to read the whole book. Generally speaking, Command and Control, which was written by the same guy who wrote Fast Food Nation, provided a complete history of nuclear weapons in the U.S., and it is as scary as all fuck. After you read this book, you’ll realize how absolutely mind blowing it is that we haven’t had a major accident with a nuclear weapon — like, incredibly absolutely mind blowing. You’ll also learn how ridiculously close we’ve come to blowing up major cities in the continental U.S., how crazy-scary bureaucracy can be, and read about, in heavy detail, one major accident that could have been catastrophic but, for reasons that have nothing to do with how smart we are as a species, simply wasn’t. A heck of a book. - Watchmen
After reading both The Vision Revolution and Command and Control, I wanted something a little bit “lighter,” something I could knock out in just a few days and that would have a story that totally hooked me. I decided to read Watchmen, the classic graphic novel, because a) I enjoyed the movie; b) I’d heard that the book was a ton better; and c) I was in the mood for another graphic novel and Watchmen is generally considered the best of the best in the field. It did not disappoint. - Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
I wrote a blog post about this one, so I’ll just say that I originally picked up the book because of a conversation with one of my high-school students about the origin of the universe, and that Holt’s book takes a look at various answers conceived by some of the greater thinkers in the West. - You
I wrote a blog post about this one too, so I’ll just say that it’s a book about a video-game designer who is attempting to design the ultimate game, and it was, generally speaking, a fun read. - Foundation
After reading Earthsea and the Patternmaster series, I figured I’d attempt another great series, Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi series, Foundation. I started, as you do, with book #1, which is aptly titled, Foundation. The book chronicles the origin and development of a civilization whose mission is to save the future of humanity based on the prophecies of a “psychohistorian,” and while I enjoyed the book, I wasn’t spurred on to continue the whole series. I may come back it in the future, but for now, I felt content to let it lie. - Siddhartha
I read this as part of a book club with my high-school and middle-school students, all of whom were also in the middle of a four-week seminar on the world’s religions. Hesse’s novel imagines the life of a Buddha-like character who goes through many changes on his way to enlightenment, and because it wrestles with many of the same questions that my students were wrestling with in their seminar, I thought it’d be a good fit. - The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
I used Huston Smith’s survey of the world’s religions as the basis for my lectures during the seminar I mentioned above. Smith comes at each of the religions as a Christian, but he provides a sympathetic reading of each religion, and that was my ultimate goal for the seminar: to arouse a sense of empathy in my students so that they could enter the world with a tolerant and peaceful understanding of the world’s various belief structures. - Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years
This book easily wins the “best subtitle of the year” award. It covers a period in early Christian history (the fourth and fifth centuries) when disputes about the inner nature of Jesus (was he all man, all divine, or half and half) led to deaths, exile, and social upheavals throughout the Roman empire. - The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India
A fantastic book that chronicles an historic meeting between the Dalai Lama and a group of American Jews, written by a Jewish poet who was present at the meeting. Using Buddhism as a contrast, the book examines what it means to be Jewish after the Holocaust and after the creation of Israel. It also reveals the commonalities (and differences) between Jewish mysticism and Buddhist thought. If you’re Jewish in America (or simply have an interest in comparative religion, as I do), then this book is a must read. Not only is it an honest take written by an individual who (prior to the meeting) considered himself a secular Jew, but it’s also a poet’s presentation of deep and mystical concepts as well as human connections. It’s just a wonderful book.
And that’s it. Those are the books I read in 2013. I hope you found something new you might enjoy. As for me, I still have about 100 pages left in The Satanic Verses, so I better get to work.