Everything I've Read in 2017

Maybe you thought that 2017 was a dumpster fire of a year. Maybe you were able to find the silver lining and the year brought you long sought solace. Either way, the calendar year is over after an overwhelming amount of calamity and head and heartache, 2018 is at our collective doorstep. New Years make me hopeful and they’re a fresh start, so hooray for that.

Here’s everything I read this year:

1. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood was my first foray into Murakami. I went in wanting to love it, but didn’t emerge from the experience wholly satisfied. I’m glad that I gave his work another chance because Kafka on the Shore was entertaining and enjoyable from cover to cover and filled with taking cats, oedipal prophecies, and mysticism. Murakami is a wonderful storyteller, the narrative is compelling and there is solid character development. It has all of the makings of a top-notch novel.

2. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is still on my to-do list. It may always remain there, but in the meantime I still enjoy (and sometimes struggle with) DFW’s dense, writing style–filled with footnotes (he loves footnotes), self-awareness and a sometimes irritating level of detail. Consider the Lobster is a book of his essays. My favorite from the collection is one titled “Up Simba” where he writes about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign and riding the bus called “The Straight Talk Express” while researching for the original article published in the April 2000 issue of Rolling Stone. This year maverick McCain made a lot of headlines//received a lot of press coverage standing up to the Trump agenda and because of his brain cancer diagnosis (and also due to the latter while also conducting the former). “Up Simba” gives an amazingly detailed account of McCain’s time spend as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War (another topic that was made highly relevant in 2017 with the release of Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s incredible PBS documentary film on the topic).

3. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Another novel incorporating the talking cat motif. I would be lying if the talking black cat wasn’t at least partially a pull here for me. This one is a classic and I’m trying to slowly catch up on my Russian literature (I think one novel from the genre/year is sufficient because they’re always such downers). The novel combines two parts–one set in ancient Jerusalem (a city that has personal relevance for me this year and that’s received even more global attention than usual as of late) and one in contemporary Moscow. The devil visits Moscow (an atheist state, under Stalin’s rule) with a vodka and chess-loving black cat, while the plot of Pontius Pilate plays out in what later emerges as a novel (written by a writer, known as the Master). The Master’s mistress, Margarita is tempted by the devil. This one is a surreal dark comedy that will force your mind though existential hoops.

4. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This one is a post-colonial classic (that also ventures into pre-colonial life) in late nineteenth century Nigeria. I never had to read it in school (like many did), but I enjoyed it in adulthood–from the descriptions of patriarchal tribal native customs to the heavy blows of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on one man’s (Okonkwo) life and on the Igbo community.

5. Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

This book recommendation from a close friend was the perfect dovetail from J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. After scrambling to answer ‘How did [Trump’s election] happen?’ in late 2016 into early 2017, we [woke folks in America] found ourselves voraciously reading anything we could get our hands on to explain this all away. Hochschild is a Berkley sociologist (it’s not as bad as it may sound) interested in how people on the right think. She spent five years in Louisiana talking with people on the other side of her “empathy wall.” (Defined as an obstacle that prevents a deep understanding with another person). She picked the state because it ranks 49th in ‘human development’ and extremely low in overall heath, education and child well-being, yet its citizens mostly spurn federal help. Despite the environmental concerns that local industry poses, they are also extremely anti-government regulation. The simplified logic behind it all is more oil = more jobs = more prosperity and less need for government. It’s a fascinating look at a small pocket of America until a microscope–in a slightly different vein from Vance’s story.

6. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

A friend of a friend I met at a party recommended this one when I mentioned that I loved the Elena Ferrante novels. It’s not fair to call it a trashy beach read, because it warrants more praise and merit than that, but I would group it in the same category as the Ferrante books. It’s a love story at its core, taking place in the 1960s on the coast of the Ligurian Sea. An Italian innkeeper meets an American actress and what ensues is a story outlined over the course of fifty years. It’s hopeful and gripping.

7. Acid Test by Tom Shroder

I found this book on a ‘leave a book, take a book’ shelf in a Moroccan hotel in the fall of 2016. The subject matter piqued my interest and though the narratives were a bit hard to follow at times, it does a good job outlining successful case studies where individuals with PTSD used controlled amounts of psychedelic drugs to help their psyche. Overly regulated and wildly cast as illegal and dangerous, these drugs have true healing properties.

8. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I attended a commencement speech in May where Walter Isaacson was the keynote. It was a really wonderful speech and Isaacson quoted job a lot–because he spent so much time with him after Jobs persistently requested that Isaacson be his personal biographer after Jobs knew his cancer case was terminal. Isaacson is an incredible biographer and he interviewed over 100 of those close to Jobs for this book. He also made a point to seek out all angles of the story–he interviewed his loved ones as well as people who Jobs screwed over in business. The book also outlines (in great detail) the entire trajectory of Apple, from an idea Jobs had with Steve Wozniak (“Woz”) to Steve breaking off to form NeXT, to ripping off Xerox’s technology to present day. Jobs insisted that the masses were too stupid to know what they wanted and had to be told (he was against market research and what’s today known as user experience design), but still ultimately knew exactly to deliver a product that would succeed. He was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus and insisted on rounded corners. He was also vehemently against the stylus and it’s my personal opinion that he’s rolling in his grave over the Apple pencil. This was definitely my top read of the year and Jobs’ complicated backstory and fascinating mind are described so well in this work.

9. Swing Time by Zadie Smith

This was my first Zadie Smith book, and perhaps I should have started elsewhere. The story jumps between London and West Africa, and switches between the past and present to tell the story of friendship between two brown girls, and their respective hardships through the lens of competitive dance. The plot was lacking, but again sort of reminiscent of the Ferrante novels in the way that they outline the antagonistic aspect of female friendship and coming of age. Despite this experience I still want to read White Teeth.

10. The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest

I did a bit of research into what a good first read on astrology would be, since I wanted to learn a bit more about signs and such. This was a pretty good introduction covering the planet, the signs, houses, and aspects. It also includes a chapter on how to interpret charts. I’ll need to follow it up with something that goes more in-depth, since there are still a lot of gaps in my knowledge.

11. A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Latham

I was a big fan of Lethem’s 2003 Fortress of Solitude, the semi-autobiographical coming of age tale of growing up motherless in a gentrifying Brooklyn in the 1970s (through the 1990s). A Gambler’s Anatomy is about a backgammon gambler, Bruno Alexander, winning money from rich folks who think they can challenge his peerless game. A pesky blot eventually blurs his vision and has graver implications for the once-psychic protagonist. A weird read, for sure–but it’s certainly worth it.

12. Sapiens, A Brief History of Human King by Yuval Noah Harari

I always see people reading this one on the subway and a friend mentioned she was reading this over the summer. It harps on the premise that 100,000 years ago there were at least six human special inhabiting earth and today there is just one: us, homo sapiens. The book outlines scenarios for how we succeeded to dominate and why our foraging ancestors came together to create cities and kingdoms, how we came to believe in human rights, to trust the system of money and to become enslaved by systems of bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism. How will our species progress (or not) into the future millennia?

As mentioned in the Steve Jobs bio, Jobs, shaped largely by a trip to India in his youth and his Buddhist ideals, read this particular title one a year. I didn’t quite understand the pull after reading it myself–the author comes off as pompous and does a subpar job detailing his life and an even worse job outlining his system of beliefs. I did make a friend on the subway who asked me about the title and proceeded to give me her card and invite me to her poetry reading. I still fail to understand why this is considered a classic in spiritual literature.

14. Moonglow by Michael Chabon

This was my first Chabon novel. When I was reading this on the subway, a man stopped me and told me that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is his favorite book and I have to read that one too. Moonglow was inspired by Chabon’s grandfather’s deathbed confessions while he’s on painkillers. From pre-war South Philly to Germany to a Florida retirement home, to a prison in New York, the novel collapses one man’s life into a week. As Goodreads puts it, it’s “a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.” While I enjoyed it, and this problem may be mine, but I had a hard time following the story in some spots.

15. In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred McCoy

I find myself asking why did I choose to end the year reading this particular book? I read an excerpt from the author on Brain Pickings and was inspired to order it from Amazon. Ending the year with a downer book isn’t necessarily a bad thing: sure, I’ve got different scenarios for the end of the world playing through my head, but the scariest part is that all of these are not too far from reality. Maybe it’ll somehow make me more optimistic in 2018, but I’m almost afraid to ask myself ‘how much worse could things get?’ The end of the book really forces you to put on your tin foil hat while McCoy takes you through five possible scenarios for the demise of the empire of the United States of America. As we all know by now, Trump is not the cause of the downfall, he is merely a symptom of it. By 2030/2040 it looks like China will surely be on top and it’s largely unclear what the role of the States will be.

I still remain hopeful for 2018. Happy New Year y’all!