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.

Luke Burgis on prolific Substack writers:

At some level, the pure volume of writing—especially if you’re halfway decent at it—is perceived by some people as actual knowledge, even if you’re not saying anything at all, or even if you’re making ridiculous arguments riddled with fallacies.

Every once in a while, some 6,000 word word salad will land in my inbox from a figure like Freddie deBoer or Matty Yglesias or Richard Hanania—and I stay subscribed, just so I know what’s going on (maybe I shouldn’t)—and I think, “Lord, have mercy. Who has time to respond to all of these things? Or who would actually want to make themselves that miserable? I sure don’t!” And then I get back to work.

Feeling the same, I unsubscribed from most newsletters long ago.

Writing and editing are distinct skills. As I gaze into a stream of text that someone else wrote and several more people edited, as I try to make sense of the reds and the greens and the teals of Word’s tracked changes stacked on top of the red squiggles and the double underlines, as the nested comments flow one after another until my (aging!?) M1 MacBook Air begins to stutter, I realize that, at heart, I am a writer.

Happy New Year!

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.

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.

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.

I look forward to removing other people’s requests from Apple Music recommendations. Maybe the 2024 Top 10 list will reflect my actual (poor) taste. Until then:

1. The Schuyler Sisters (Hamilton cast)
2. Peaches (Jack Black)
3. Alexander Hamilton (Hamilton cast)
4. History Has Its Eyes On You (Hamilton cast)
5. Wait For It (Leslie Odom, Jr.)
6. Satisfied (Hamilton cast)
7. Viva La Vida (Coldplay)
8. Aaron Burr, Sir (Hamilton cast)
9. A Sky Full of Stars (Coldplay)
10. You’ll Be Back (Jonathan Groff)

And here is last year’s list.

Only six movies that came out this year made it to my watch list:

• Oppenheimer: three movies in one, and only one of them was good.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: forgettable.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: easily the best of the lot.
• Elemental: initially a disappointment, but has more depth the more I think about it.
• Barbie: better than Oppenheimer but also too long and not very good by the end.
• The Family Plan: a fun throwback to the 1990s, but also forgettable.

I did not see Killers of the Flower Moon yet, but I hope to do so soon. I did watch a bunch of older movies, some of which were quite good, but naming them all here would not mean much (and you can always go to the movies tag). Let me instead list the movies I rewatched this year, in the order in which they came out:

• The Godfather (1972)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, extended ed. (2001), and notice the 1980s and ’90s-sized gap there.
• The Ring (2002), the rare horror movie that is actually scary.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), which is the parents' best friend when in need of a teachable moment.
• Gone Girl (2014), in which Ben Affleck is watchable (a rarity).
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), and I still won’t forgive myself for watching this movie on the plane the first time around.

Every year I time myself that I should watch more movies, and every year television wins out. May 2024 be the same.