My list for the year, ordered by similarity. All are physical prints already on the bookshelf, just waiting to be snubbed for whatever else catches my attention.

1. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
2. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
3. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
5. That We May Live by various authors
6. Liberation Day by George Saunders
7. You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison
8. Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein
9. False Dawn by John Gray
10. A Theater of Envy by René Girard
11. Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee
12. Order Without Design by Alain Bertaud
13. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
14. Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan
15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
16. A Man of Iron by Troy Senik
17. The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
18. Metamathematics by Stephen Wolfram
19. Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Taleb
20. Towards a Theoretical Biology by C.H. Waddington
21. Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin
22. Seeing with Fresh Eyes by Edward Tufte
23. A Guide for the Perplexed by Werner Herzog
24. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Here are the wishlists for 2022 and 2023, and the respective outcomes.

At the beginning of the year, I set out to read 23 books. Mission accomplished? As expected, my favorite of the year was not on that wish list.

Here are all 23, ordered by some semblance of category.

1. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison: Harrison at his best, just don’t expect a neat resolution.
2. Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison: a fitting end to my favorite sci-fi trilogy.
3. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka: if Harrison awards someone a Booker, I’d better read their book.
4. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: the translation was good, but I imagine the original was even better.
5. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline: I think about the Bronze Age collapse more than I do about the Roman Empire, actually.
6. On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt: the year of LLM-generated garbage was a good time to refresh BS knowledge.
7. The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset: prophetic.
8. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber: bad.
9. The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel: investing should be left to the professionals.
10. Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand: half of the book is good, but only time will tell which half.
11. How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia: got me to buy an actual CD player, just so I could listen to this anthology.
12. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend: his statement that in science “anything goes” could have been controversial only to those who willfully misunderstood.
13. Fundamentals of Clinical Trials by Lawrence M. Friedman: too pedantic.
14. Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper: almost a year in and I am still using index cards, although not in the way Scott intended.
15. Writing with Style: The Economist Guide by Lane Greene: more fun than a style guide should be.
16. Zombies in Western Culture by John Vervaeke et al: true and unnerving.
17. The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási: don’t be fooled by the self-help title, it is a good book.
18. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis: the most influential of the books I’ve read this year as it led directly to my favorite.
19. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard: the best book I’ve read this year, and one that I’ve been thinking about the most.
20. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton: I should read it again.
21. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter: how a scientist deals with grief.
22. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken: how a Christian deals with grief.
23. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: I still can’t believe she was in her 20s.

Not too bad, considering we had a flooded basement and our second move in three years, with some writing wedged in between. And here is last year’s list.

Finished reading: A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken 📚, a book about love, death and grief so earnest that any half-assed paragraph from me would not be fair. The title is justified.

Finished reading: Debt by David Graeber 📚, dropped about a third of the way through. For a book supposedly about the history of debt it had too much speculation and too many baseless claims. Looking back, The Dawn of Everything had similar tendencies, but his co-author David Wengrow seems to have been a moderating influence. Bullshit Jobs was also a tedious read, so as good of an essayist Graeber was, the talent didn’t translate to books.

📚 Writing with Style: The Economist Guide may not be the most important style guide to come out, but it has to be the funniest. Between the self-references and the dry wit lie many lessons: that even professional writers do some things a certain way because the alternative would “look weird”; that I use too many commas, the Oxford comma being one of them; and that if my name were ever to be mentioned in The Economist it would lose its diacritics — unless I insisted they stay. It earned its place on the shelf above the screen.

Stop the presses! Actually, don’t stop — please keep them running — there will be a new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack out next week. My pre-order is in. (ᔥDaring Fireball)

Rest in peace, Charlie Munger. If you are… were… are a fan of Charlie’s and haven’t heard of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, may this post correct the error.

Quote of the morning:

My view is that any theory of what is wrong with American health care is true because American health care is wrong in every possible way.

Very true! This is from Alex Tabarrok’s review of what seems to be quite a misguided book about America’s handling of covid. I’ll take Tyler’s side of that debate.

Tyler Cowen’s list of best non-fiction books of 2023 has 28 entries. Those are not all the books he read so far this year — only “the best” — and looking at the list one wonders what the criteria could possibly have been. The best at adding to the noise, perhaps?

As We May Think is one of the greatest essays ever written, and I am all for popularizing it, but one thing about the most recent mention just rubbed me the wrong way in how it presented its author, Vannevar Bush:

Bush was part of the Oppenheimer set; he was an engineer whose work was critical to the creation of the atomic bomb.

This paints the picture of an engineer working at Los Alamos under Oppenheimer to make the bomb, when in fact Bush was leading the United States' nuclear program for two whole years before Oppenheimer became involved. Oppenheimer’s predecessor? Sure. Part of his set? Misleading.

I suspect it was presented this way because of that movie; the more I keep seeing these kinds of distortions as a result, the less I think of it. This is why I will keep recommending The Making of the Atomic Bomb to everyone and anyone who was tickled by the Los Alamos scenes — the only ones worth watching.