- The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 by Jonathan Healey. I excitedly bought this 433 page history book upon reading reviews because it sounded like a fun read and could be related to my research. I still cannot figure out if I liked it. The first 1/6 is social history, which I loved. Then the middle 2/3 is very intricate military and court history, which I frankly found excruciatingly boring. Names are dropped as though they should be known but never given context, and they are never returned to; this happens several times per page. Because Healey has about a century of history to cover, everything moved so quickly that it was impossible to tell a minor battle from a major turning point. If I didn’t already know Cromwell was important, for example, I would not have known it from this book. I thought Charles I was on the verge of returning to the throne, then 5 pages later he was dead. The speed of the book and lack of contextualizing made everything feel flat, and I do not not know much more about the Glorious Revolution than when the book started. It was essentially Stuarts edging Catholic versus their Protestant country, and then the installation of William of Orange established Parliamentary superiority. While I didn’t exactly know that before starting the book, I doubt this is a “new”, to borrow an adjective from the book’s subtitle, analysis. Perhaps if I was British or knew more British history I would have found something new here; instead, I feel like I read a dry, though well-written, history book. That said, I underlined a ton, took a lot of notes of potential data sources, and the bibliography is thorough, so the book was not a loss.
- Grade: B-
- The Monocle Guide to Hotels, Inns and Hideaways: A Manual for Everyone from Holidaymakers to Hoteliers. My wife bought me this 304 page guide for the holidays, which I appreciate it because I probably would not have myself. The book consists of a 1 page overview of 100 leading hotels, then it profiles employees of the hotels, talks to hotel schools, and gives longer profiles of other hotels. I am not sure what I will carry away from this book, but I enjoyed it. The cover is beautiful, the paper high quality, and images crisp. I do not know how to grade it and do not regret having read it. It is a very Monocle book.
- Grade: B-
- The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I added this 101 page nonfiction book to my Amazon Wish List after learning about it on an Ezra Klein podcast episode, and my mom bought it for me over the holidays. I appreciated Heschel’s emphasis on the holiness of time and the distinction between that and humanity’s world of space. The epilogue was the best section, so I’m glad I kept at it; the emphasis on presentness in time reminds me of mindfulness meditation. Overall, though, the book could have been a long essay, as the chapters were pretty repetitive. If the book were written now, it would be 200 pages, 14 point font, and 1.5 spacing.
- Grade: B-.
- dopamine: Finding Balance in the AGe of Indulgence by Anne Lembke. I grabbed this 224 page nonfiction book because I was in the mood for pop science, the author is an MD, and the Huberman Lab podcast got me interested in learning more about dopamine. I don’t regret having read it, but it is not what I wanted. I wanted more scientific explanation of how dopamine works, how much it responds to different stimuli, its role in addiction, and so on, but instead there was very little of that. The closest Lembke comes is cutesy comics in Chapter 3. Though I do not know any more about how dopamine works, the book was not without merits. The recurring vignettes from patients were interesting and helpful for putting into relief what severe addiction looks like and how it can come from anything that releases dopamine, such as reading romance novels or food. Since the book did not say much about dopamine, it spent a lot of time trying to be about more, such as strategies against addiction, pursuing balance, and self-help style lessons. Overall, the book could have been an essay.
- Grade: B-
- The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. I learned about this 330 page business history on a year end list and grabbed it based on the strength of reviews and a latent curiosity about commodity markets. I learned a lot and the clear writing made it easy to devour pages, but ultimately it was less than I hoped it would be. Its chief fault is that it reads like a history of Glencore with some asides to traders before Marc Rich (Glencore was founded by affiliates of Marc Rich after his US indictment for selling oil to Iran), a few contemporaries, and primarily focuses on oil. I wanted more detail on why commodity traders were able to disrupt the Seven Sisters, but it was presented almost as a fait accompli. The traders’ business model, relying on bank financing, was not clear until the final chapter, an important point that explains how they could expand so quickly. And despite some mentions of agriculture traders buying directly from farmers around the world and using knowledge from that to buy and sell at profitable times, I did not learn about the market part of the commodity market. Perhaps that means that oil trading, the book’s focus, was or is dominated by relationships (corruption), not information. Perhaps the most interesting dynamic I learned is how many poor countries, especially when ruled by dictators, use commodity traders to raise funds instead of going to organizations like the IMF or countries that would impose more conditions in return for money. Worth a read, but I still can’t help feel misled by the endorsements; I guess you really have to read a book for yourself.
- Grade: B
- Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell. I bought this 194 page nonfiction book on a whim from my Amazon List, having added it based on strong reviews from lots of places. It was definitely worth it and the best book I’ve read this year, but it also could have been more arresting. The premise is that China faces a human capital crisis that prevents it from transitioning its workforce as it deindustrializes. That is straightforward enough, but the book is interesting because of how it unfolds the argument; there is a certain elegance to how the situation is unfolded. I learned a ton about rural China, got a deeper exploration of the hukou than I normally see, the dangers of very quick industrialization, public health and interventions, CCP career incentives,and plenty more. The book’s main limitation is the writing, which is too academic too often. The content is great, but you have to really want it. I was able to skim a lot because of academic style repetition, whether that’s a pro or con or not is up to you.
- Grade: B+
- The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik. My wife bought this 254 page pop science book in response to our baby becoming a toddler, and I was excited to read it because I know of Alison via her WSJ column and sibling relationship with the best writer at the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik. The introduction made me excited because I had not realized “parenting” as a common word did not come around until the 1970s, and Gopnik’s metaphor of the carpenter (strict by the book parent to raise the best kid possible) and the gardener (make the foundation from which children flourish) intrigued. Unfortunately, the book is primarily a summary of child development research, and “carpenter” is a straw man that is never clearly defined. Later chapters rarely carried through the metaphor, making it feel tacked on, flimsy, not part of Gopnik’s original framing of research. For example, the reader is intermittently told carpenter parenting is a middle class phenomenon, but how lower and upper class childrearing differs is never explained, making it hard to know exactly what carpentering parenting is. In other words, the book is not helpful for parents. That said, it has interesting parts and is better written than the modal pop science book, which is why the grade is not lower.
- Grade: B
- Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. My wife bought me this 318 page novel for the holidays. It was the perfect vacation book, a quick-paced plot with compelling characters that is very well-written. I do not remember the last time I wish I read a novel with a pen, yet several times I wanted to underline the narrator’s asides. The book is set in Harlem in the 1950s and 60s. It provides a lot of detail about Harlem, especially, and Manhattan, a fair bit, in addition to talking about consumer electronics, race (not central to the story but never far from the main action). I especially loved the details on furniture design. The way I learned about midcentury mass market furniture reminds me of learning about post-war motel culture when reading Lolita.
- Grade: A-
- Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty. My mom bought me this 235 page journalism memoir from my Amazon list. I enjoyed it but it’s not a classic. I call it a memoir because there is not an overarching thesis and there are lots of fun details that could only come from direct experiences, and I enjoyed it because the writing is crisp, stories interesting, and topic urgent. My notes are not extensive but I did enjoy reading it, worth $30.
- Grade: B
- Bringing up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman. I reread this 360 page memoir cum parenting guide as my baby approached toddlerdom and her personality became more forceful. I thoroughly enjoyed it, more so than the first time judging by my 2022 review. I think the difference is that having failed to find an agent for my own parenting book, I read it with more a critical eye and could appreciate the informative yet breezy tone and care that went into the chapter structures, features that frankly my proposal could have been better with. I also relearned a few things, such as that the French use a symbolic cadre (frame) to establish behavior boundaries, not the carré (square) I had been saying for 22 months, and that the secret to well-behaved kids is apparently authority. In fact, the biggest eye-opener this time for me was about French adults. Post-1968, the French are very skeptical of political authorities decreeing behavior, yet inside the household there are still rigid expectations that the kid follows the parents’ dictates because they are the parents, tout court. My wife and I definitely will not be that rigid – Druckerman carefully points out that French parents and society at large can be too withholding of affirmation – but am happy to be reminded that it is okay to act authoritatively. (Frankly, the same demeanor is necessary for the classroom.) Anyway, now that I have read at least a dozen parenting books since first reading this one, I highly recommend it to all parents.
- Grade: A-
- How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr. I bought this 401 page history book at a recent APSA, having read good reviews when it came out. (The best part about APSA is the cheap books.) The beauty of having a lot of books is that you can pick up an unread one years after having bought it and still enjoy it. This book is the best I have read this year and highlights why I am stingy with As. Sharply written with a great eye for detail, Immerwahr has written a history of American expansion. I went into the book thinking it was simply about current overseas territories and possessions, but it starts with America’s westward expansion across the Appalachia mountains. I therefore learned a ton of interesting facts. America’s second longest war, after Afghanistan, is the Philippine-American war because of the Moro Rebellion from 1902-1913; not only did we kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos on Luzon via starvation and disease from 1899-1902, the continued rebellion across the archipelago was repressed just as brutally. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in was in Samoa because it was and is an American territory, just like British academics writing about Africa. Snafu is an acronym for situation normal all f***d up. The rise of synthetic, petroleum-based chemistry reduced the need to hold territory to acquire resources, and the ability to project military power quickly around the world further reduced the need for holding land, making it easier for the United States to maintain an empire without maintain an imperium. Immerwahr is an Associate Professor of history at Northwestern and makes me question who I am as a professor.
- Grade: A
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I borrowed my wife’s Little, Brown Books’ 214 page version of this iconic novel of teen angst to take a break from the gargantuan nonfiction book I was reading. I had not read the book since high school English and remember finding it boring, but I figured I should read it as an adult. Overall, I liked it more than I thought I would, though I still do not fully understand why it is a classic. Holden Caufield certainly has a distinct voice, and reading it made me wonder how many popular words or phrases originate from it such as “phony” or “old <name”. Tons of phrases are often frequently repeated, such as “I swear to God”, “they [or I] really do”, every variation of “damn” imaginable, and “if you want to know the truth”, and I am not sure how I feel about that. I suppose it sounds like how a high schooler would talk and write, but it also makes the book feel less like literature and more like a diary. Perhaps this verité style is the charm and was novel and shocking upon first publication in 1951, but 73 years later, without context, the tone was a bit too juvenile for me. I had also forgotten how irksome Holden Caufield is, both in his demeanor towards others and smoking and alcohol consumption habits of an adult. Having an antihero does make people like a book or movie more, so perhaps that is part of the book’s appeal. Since the book is so old, reading it gave me a sense of the immediate postwar world that I do not normally get in my books. Finally, the best part of the book was seeing the sentences my wife underlined when she read it as a student, gems such as “Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad” and “Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.” I didn’t know my wife had an emo phase in high school, though I suppose what adolescent does not.
- Grade: B
- Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett. I do not remember where or when I bought this 521 page intellectual history, but it sat on my bookshelf for years taunting me. (I suspect books were much longer before the rise of the internet and then smartphones.) Having few other unread books around and being in the middle of summer, I finally cracked it open. I am not sure what to think of the book. On one hand, it is as well-written as any nonfiction I’ve ever read, including Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams, and is the best written book from an academic (Dennett is a renowned philosopher at Tufts). Most creative works (books, albums, movies) start strong and quickly fade, but Dennett maintains zip, style, and wit until the very end, a truly remarkable accomplishment. I saw constructions I have not seen anywhere else: “Vast” always as a proper noun to emphasize infinitude, a space after an open parenthesis and before a closed one, and a block quote in a footnote. I cannot say my understanding of evolution really changed, though I understand technical points better, but I did appreciate the intellectual history component of the book, which is about the middle 3/5 of the book. The insider baseball intellectual beatdowns of Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky were particularly entertaining, and his support of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker explains why they are the first blurbs on the back cover. But the reason I cannot give it an A+, which I told my wife it would receive when I was “only” 200 pages into the book, is because I did not learn anything about the meaning of life. Yes, evolution means there is probably not a god, but Bennett does not offer an alternative meaning of life, nothing beautiful and calming to take religion’s place. The unmoored angst that evolution and atheism creates has always been its biggest weakness, and I thought Dennett was going to explain how those two preserve, strengthen, or provide a new source of meaning. He does not, which is the book’s ultimate shortcoming.
- Grade: A
- Hoop Atlas: Mapping the Remarkable Transformation of the Modern NBA by Kirk Goldsberry. I bought this 244 page modern basketball history book because I knew Goldsberry as the creator of famous basketball heatmaps. The book tells the story of the NBA from Jordan to Jokic, and I learned a lot. It is best for trivia, such as the following. Brook Lopez is the only player in NBA history to have 5 seasons of 0 made 3 pointers and 5 seasons of at least 100 made 3 pointers. Manu Ginobili has the highest winning percentage of any player, followed by teammates Parker and Duncan. Dirk Nowitzki has the longest cumulative made shot distance of any player. There were 50% more three point attempts in the ’22-’23 season than the entire 1980s. Steve Kerr is the most accurate three point shooter ever. The book is poorly written, however, quite repetitive. It says the same thing over and over in every chapter. The repetition repeats repeatedly.
- Grade: B
- 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. I bought this 187 page history book because I would like to know more about the Bronze Age world and it had several strong reviews. The most interesting thing I learned is that Adam Gopnik, possibly my favorite writer, is close with the author, because that’s the only way to explain why his front cover endorsement would call the book “Astonishing … with eerie relevance.” The various back cover endorsements talk about how similar to the modern world the Bronze Age was, which I suppose is true if you are willing to ignore scale, technology, and a field of knowledge with more holes than Swiss cheese. All I really learned is that we know almost nothing about the Late Bronze Age because the archeological record is so thin, which is not the fault of archeologists but the nature of the field. The book is so full of weak sentences that, while necessitated by the state of our knowledge, make it impossible for me to remember anything from the book. Here is an example: “It is unclear who destroyed Lachish VI or the earlier city of Lachish VII. Both, or neither, could have been devasted by the Sea Peoples, or by someone — or something — else entirely.” In other words, it could be that I remember, or do not, whether it was possible to very or not at all like this book, which may not have been a book at all that was read, or eventually skimmed, with focus of some indeterminate amount. The second most interesting thing I learned is that it is possible for me to give bad grades to books I read.
- Grade: C
- Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Training by Steven Low. I read about 75 pages of this 587 page fitness guide and skimmed the rest. I learned about it several years ago but never bought it, so when I saw it on the neighborhood giveaway table I grabbed it without hesitation. It was fine. Some takeaways are to learn to tuck and roll when falling instead of pirouetting, my current technique, though why was never clearly explained; train on a wall with my belly, not back, facing it, though why was never clearly explained (I think to work on falling properly); train frequently (my infrequent training is why I still cannot do a handstand after 6 years of practice); and to fight for every second of holding once in the air. This last one was the one I internalized the most, and it cost me. Fighting for a freestanding hold one Saturday at the park, I messed up something with my symmetry and right hand, which caused me to dislocated my right ring finger at the first knuckle. Now I won’t be able to train the handstand for several weeks at least.
- Grade: C
- Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do It Once and Do It Right by Jamie Glowacki. I read this 304 page guide to potty train in the Fall after my wife warned me we were quickly approaching a narrow window in which to potty train our daughter, otherwise WE WOULD HARM HER FOREVER. (304 pages with large font, double spacing, and generous margins, i.e. 152 pages if the book were written 60 years ago.) Everyone we know did the three day method, which bothered me because I do not like monocultures and losing a day of work, but I could not find online guides to any other method. It turns out the three day method comes from this book, though to be fair the author is not as absolute about three days as she is portrayed. No, she says you should take 4-5 days for the initial training. Anyway, the book was fine. It gave us the guideposts we needed to potty train our daughter, and we really did get her out of diapers (except for overnight, still working on that) within three days. We have only had one accident and it was my fault, so the book must have been good for something. The author’s tone is strong, which I appreciate, and the writing style is conversational, which I do not.
- Grade: B
- The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge. This 324 page history book tells the story of 19th century American race relations through the prism of a prestigious Charleston, SC family. Two daughters of the patriarch had an instinctual distaste for slavery and became leading abolitionists in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Their brother had two children with a slave, Nancy, whose family lived in the Grimke’s Charleston house, not the plantation, and Nancy taught them they were better than other slaves. One, Archie, graduated from Harvard, became a leading Republican in Massachusetts, and Ambassador to the Dominican Republic; the other, Frank, graduated from Princeton and became a minister at the leading Black Presbyterian church in Washington D.C.. Archie had a daughter, Nana, with whom the book ends. I learned a lot about America from this book. Some things that stick out are that even Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were very racist, with white mobs in Philadelphia periodically assaulting Black neighborhoods, theaters in Massachusetts using segregated seating, and Archie and Frank facing racist bullying at kids in Massachusetts. I learned many freed slaves lived in Charleston. Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it did not allow for female suffrage. After the Civil War, Massachusetts was the most industrialized state in the United States; someone needs to write a book tracing the geographic route of America’s industrial heartland from the Northeast to the Midwest and then through the South.
- Grade: B.
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