Books of 2022

Once again, I kept a list of the books I read this past year. I don’t have a particular reason to think this is of general interests, but for my own amusement, here they are:

• Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash. Really like this one. A Dutch East India ship wrecked on its way to the East Indies in, if memory serves, the sixteenth century. Survivors wind up on a spit of land and some bad dudes take over.
• The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina. A series of articles about various things going on in lawless or underpoliced parts of the ocean. Slavery. Whale hunting. Hunting the whale hunters and poachers. Abortions at sea just beyond the jurisdiction of anti-abortion countries.
• Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau. This one didn’t really land for me. From a Googled book review, “case studies of regular people in search of long-term happiness. Whether they’ve walked across continents, founded nationwide charities or – like the author – visited every country in the world by the time they’re thirty-five.”
• Northland by Porter Fox. The guy travels the northern border of the United States and tells about his experience as well as some of the history in those areas. Reminded me a bit of the style of Tony Horwitz’s books. This was a good one.
• Later by Stephen King. Enjoyable fiction of the sort that King produces so reliably. The protagonist is a kid who has the ability to see the ghosts of dead people.
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. This was a re-read. Ender Wiggin is a little boy who is smarter than everyone, goes to space Battle School, and unwittingly commits a genocide against the alien Bugger race.
• A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee. This goes through the ups and downs of living organisms on our planet. The sheer scale of time is mind-bending. And the several episodes of extinction events are humbling. As individuals and, even as a species, we are fairly incidental and inconsequential in the scheme of things.
• Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. This is a sequel to Ender’s game. Ender is dealing with the aftermath of being the Xenocide and ends up on a planet inhabited by the second alien race encountered by humans.
• Drunk: How We Slipped, Stumbled, and Danced Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. Alcohol has some very obvious negative effects which would seem to impose some competitive disadvantages when it comes to evolution and to competing cultures and civilizations. And, yet, use of alcohol and drunkenness is almost ubiquitous across history and civilizations. What advantages explain its staying power? He offers several explanations. Among them that alcohol facilitates certain kinds of lateral thinking that helps with problem solving at times, it facilitates social cohesion in certain ways, and it makes living in the relatively cramped, oppressive conditions of an agricultural civilization more tolerable.
• Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. The third book in the original Ender trilogy. The writing was worse than I remembered. But the plot was fairly interesting, having to do with a smart virus that has made itself essential to aliens on a particular planet and might contrive to take over human biology as well; with a focus on the ethical concerns this sort of thing raises.
• Billy Summers by Stephen King. Another solid piece of King fiction. Summers is a hit man who is pretty smart but plays dumb. He’s being set up.
• The Greatest Beer Run Ever by Chick Donahue. Based on a true story wherein Chickie undertakes to deliver beers from home to the guys from his neighborhood who are serving in Vietnam.
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene. A 1956 book having to do with the end of the French colonial period in Vietnam, the beginning of American involvement, and a love triangle.
• Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder. The author takes a look at the history and game play of checkers, backgammon, chess, Go, poker, Scrabble, and bridge along with efforts to “solve” those games with computers.
• Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages by Dan Jones. Very readable. A good survey of the middle ages in Western Europe. It starts with environmental catastrophe in Central Asia which displaced people who displaced the Huns who helped bring about the fall of Rome. I think we go from there to somewhere in the 15th or 16th century.
• Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates. A look at online incel culture, how those attitudes infect the broader culture, and how those things relate to a lot of the social dysfunction we see today.
• A Beautifully Foolish Endeavour by Hank Green. A sequel to “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” the two of which comprise “the Carl Saga.” It’s a science fiction novel having to do with, among other things, addictive social media controlled by a malignant narcissist from the earlier novel.
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. I really liked this one. In lieu of having him killed, the communists have a Russian nobleman confined to an upscale hotel rather than just killing him. It follows him and the hotel over the course of many years.
• Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz. Written in the late 90s, Horwitz travels around the south and looks at the influence the Civil War stil has on the area as well as giving you some history lessons about the Civil War itself. Some of the issues he identifies in the late 90s as being related to the Civil War are even more pronounced in the present day.
• Holy War: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries Old Clash of Civilization. This book provides some background about Islam’s founding and rapid expansion and the subsequent Reconquista in the Iberian peninsula. Then it provides an in depth history of Prince Henry the Navigator’s efforts with respect to Portuguese navigation culminating in da Gama’s voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and his encounters in India. We learned a lot about Columbus growing up. Da Gama’s voyage was a lot longer and more difficult and arguably more consequential. But we only learned about him in passing. It was good to read this not long after that history of the middle ages because there was a fair amount of overlap but from somewhat different perspectives.
• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Book One of the Starlight Archives. Big, sprawling epic fantasy.
• The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen. She takes you around the world, discusses the societies in those places and times, and talks about explorations happening around that time that linked one culture to another (albeit very tenuously in some cases).
• The Midwestern Survival Guide by Charlie Berens. A cute, tongue-in-cheek book about Midwestern culture.
• Die Trying by Lee Child. A Jack Reacher book. Reacher is smarter and tougher than everyone and will always defeat the bad guy and get the girl. That happens in this installment too. It’s a fun read.
• Voyagers by Nicolas Thomas. A history of the seaborne migrations that settled the islands of the Pacific.
• A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. A novella where a tea-monk who travels from town to town making tea for people who make it goes into the wilderness and encounters a wild-built robot seeking to make contact with humans.
• Chrysalis by Lincoln Child. A tech thriller/mystery.
• Retail Gangster by Gary Weiss. An account of the rise and fall of Crazy Eddie’s electronics stores in the 70s and 80s in the New York City area.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. No description needed.
• Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Book Two of the Starlight Archives.

All in all, a pretty good set of books, I’d say!