Reviews

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The Best Books of My 2018

Brought to you by the Internet Archive, the UC San Diego library system, and the team behind the Amazon Kindle.

This is the fifth in a series of annual book reviews:

I read ~113 books in 2018, and a lot of them wound up on this list. I may be giving out too many five-star ratings, but in the course of writing reviews, I remembered just how good all of these were, so… no regrets.

(My Goodreads account has a rating for every book I remember reading.)

 

The Best Books

I didn’t choose a cutoff point, but ten books stood out from the rest, either because of their sheer quality or because they were easier to read than competitors of similar quality.

Every link in this section goes to my full review on Goodreads.

Ridiculously good books:

  1. Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (free online)
  2. Impro (Keith Johnstone) (free online)
  3. Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
  4. Erfworld (free online)
  5. Understanding Power (free online)
  6. Stubborn Attachments
  7. The Structures of Everyday Life (free online)
  8. George Orwell’s Essays (free online)
  9. Vinland Saga
  10. My Name is Asher Lev (free online)

Books that were merely very good:

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A Futile Attempt To Review The Book of Disquiet

“This is my most-highlighted book of the year. It is about a man who avoids interacting with other people whenever possible, lives for the sake of his daydreams, and would rather not be alive at all — less because he feels depressed than because life is boring.

“I… still don’t understand why I like this book as much as I do.”

Aaron Gertler, The Best Books of My 2015

 

The Book of Disquiet is remarkably difficult to talk about. And yet, when a stranger messaged me on Facebook because they’d seen that I was a fan, we wound up talking about it for an hour, stumbling around in circles trying to explain the way we felt.

(Reviewing the book is like trying to make up a new language in the middle of a conversation.)

 

The book’s Goodreads entry features nothing but four-and-five-star reviews on the first page. The second page, along with lots of additional praise, contains:

  • A single one-star review, which appears to be ironic (“it is the very fact of its valuelessness that gives it its value”).
  • A three-star review where the reviewer becomes furious at Pessoa for writing only half of a brilliant book, when — like a loving parent — they know he could have done better.

It would seem that, for any common definition of “hate”, The Book of Disquiet is almost impossible to hate. And that seems right. Can you hate the air you breathe? Can you hate the ground on which you walk? Can you hate sleep?

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The Best Books of My 2017

Brought to you by the library system of the University of California, San Diego.

This is the fourth in a series of annual book reviews:

I read fewer books this year than in 2016, thanks to a new marriage and a few online serials that consumed a lot of reading time. But I’ve improved my selection process: I’m finishing more of the books I start, and learning more from the books I finish. As a result, I’d put this year’s class up against any of the other years in a… book fight?

(My Goodreads account has a rating for every book I remember reading.)

The Best Books

The first five are, in order, the books that I’ve thought about most often this year, and that I remember most vividly. The rest appear in no particular order.

  1. Ache Life History
  2. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
  3. Tools of Titans
  4. Against Democracy
  5. The Damnation of Theron Ware (free to read online, from Project Gutenberg)
  6. Hitch-22
  7. Killers of the Dream
  8. The Subjection of Women (free to read online, from Early Modern Texts)
  9. Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction
  10. Maverick
  11. War
  12. Hard to Be a God
  13. Annihilation
  14. The Traitor Baru Cormorant
  15. The Gods Are Bastards (free to read online)

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The Best Books of My 2016

This was a good year for reading, since I spent it sitting with my Kindle on airplanes. (Kindles are great — like tablets, but without all those fussy little apps that distract you from reading.)

Of the ~150 books I read this year, these are the ones that come to mind when I think of the word “best”. They are very different, and you won’t like all of them, but they all do something well.

For a list of every book I remember reading, check my Goodreads account.

Best List of All the Books

In no particular order, save for the first four, which I liked most of all.

  1. Rememberance of Earth’s Past (series, all three books)
  2. The Steerswoman (series, all four books)
  3. Chasing the Scream
  4. Rationality: From AI to Zombies
  5. The Last Samurai
  6. Axiomatic
  7. The Fifth Season
  8. The Found and the Lost
  9. The Future and its Enemies
  10. Evicted
  11. On the Run
  12. Conundrum
  13. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
  14. The Partly Cloudy Patriot
  15. Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air
  16. Machete Season
  17. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

 

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The Best Music of My 2015

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Thus, I’ll keep my writing to a minimum.

I listened to ~500 new albums and ~5000 new songs this year.

This means that I wasn’t paying enough attention to most of the music. But to make this list, a song had to catch my attention and keep my thumb on the replay button. Some of the best songs did for me what I imagine powerful drugs do for other people.
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The Best Books of My 2015

I read about 125 books this year, and these are the ones that come to mind when I think of the word “best”. They are very different, and you won’t like all of them, but they all do something well.

To quote my book-review post from last year:

I’ve sorted this list into a series of “bests”: a Best Graphic Novel for people who like those, a Best Book About Selling Stuff for people who like those, and so on. Whoever you are, I’d probably recommend many of these books to you. And some of them are free!

For a list of every book I remember reading, check out my Goodreads account.

 

Best List of All the Books

These are in alphabetical order, save for the first four, which I liked most of all.

  1. Sapiens
  2. The Neapolitan Quartet (series, all four books)
  3. The Book of Disquiet
  4. Negima! Magister Negi Magi
  5. A Civil Action
  6. Azumanga Daioh
  7. Behind the Beautiful Forevers
  8. Digger (free!)
  9. Great (free!)
  10. Gone Girl
  11. Parable of the Sower
  12. Strangers Drowning
  13. Strong Female Protagonist (free!)
  14. The Road to Wigan Pier (free!)
  15. The Vision of the Anointed
  16. The Yale Book of Quotations
  17. Them: Adventures with Extremists
  18. We Learn Nothing

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GQ Magazine Made Me Very Angry And Now I Am Complaining

It is not easy to make me angry, and it is harder still to make me angry enough that I feel the need to write about how angry I am. This is, I think, the first time I’ve written anything angry on this blog.

But GQ recently did a really good job of making me angry.

Not the entire magazine, but this story, which has inspired me to write my first post with a tag of “outrage”:

https://genius.it/www.gq.com/story/sugar-daddies-explained?

I annotated the story with the Genius Web Annotator, so you can see my notes in the original context, though the context doesn’t make the story any less terrible.

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