Books of 2023

If I counted correctly, I read about 34 books this year. Some substantial, plenty just for a good read. Books beat just doom scrolling through social media – which I probably still do too much of. Here is the list:

• Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest – Fernando Cervantes. This was a good one. A very readable history of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
• Two Nights in Lisbon – Chris Pavone. I did not enjoy this one. A mystery where a woman’s husband disappears in Lisbon. He had a double life. I grew to actively dislike the protagonist and didn’t care what happened to any of the characters.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson. Bryson is delightful. This was a re-read. Bryson starts with the Big Bang and goes from there.
• Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Very creative new(ish) science fiction series. Humanity mostly dies out. There are spiders that evolve.
• 1984 – George Orwell. We all know the book. Good to re-read from time to time. Newspeak is fascinating.
• Children of Ruin – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sequel to Children of Time. There’s a third book that I have not yet read.
• Travels With Charley – John Steinbeck. Steinbeck and his dog Charley circumnavigate the continental U.S. counterclockwise. That book inspired some blog posts. Here’s one.
• The Big U – Neal Stephenson. Things get weird at an enormous university dormitory. This is Stephenson’s earliest work. It is not his finest work. He recognizes this. I’ve read that he only allowed continued publication because his fans were having to pay outsized prices on ebay to get copies.
• The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop – Jonathan Abrams. I really enjoyed this one. It is, as the name suggests, a lot of the folks involved in early hip-hop giving their perspectives on what was going on at the time. One minor detail I hadn’t appreciated – the significance of skating rinks as early venues. They had space, decent sound systems, and were usually cheap.
• River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile – Candice Millard. One of those histories about the outsized personalities of the people exploring the blank spots on the map.
• Upgrade – Blake Crouch. Crouch writes a good sci-fi thriller. In this case gene editing has made a guy superhuman and hijinx ensue.
• The Ice Pick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science – Sam Kean. The title tells the tale. A series of chapters telling the story of various misdeeds in the name of science. The title comes from the guy who would go to fairs and perform lobotomies with an ice pick.
• From Property to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance – Sheila Kennedy and Morton Marcus. A bit of scholarship from a couple of prominent Indiana academics. A plain English discussion of social, legal, economic, and technological trends describing women’s progress from subordinates to (increasingly) equal members of society. It also describes the backlash we’re seeing to those developments.
• Poster Girl – Veronica Roth. A science fiction book telling the story of a girl who was part of an elite ruling class, who was the face on propaganda posters. When she was young, the elites were overthrown and confined in a ghetto. A decade later, she goes out into the wider world and remains recognizable.
• Unnatural History – Jonathan Kellerman. One of Kellerman’s Alex Delaware whodunit’s. A fun read, but I don’t remember too much about it.
• Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage – Rachel Gross. A nonfiction book on the current state of women’s health and its history. The history of overlooking women’s health is almost laughably bad at times.
• The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West – David McCullough. A history of the earliest settlers in the Northwest Territory – primarily around Marietta, Ohio.
• The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America – Dean Snow. Ingram was a regular sailor who got marooned in Central America in 1568. Over the course of the next year, he and two other guys walked about 3,000 miles up to the coast of Maine where they were rescued. It was particularly good for giving a sense that what is now the U.S. was a bustling, fairly developed place prior to being ravaged by the diseases that came with contact.
• Reacher: No Plan B – Lee Child. One of his Reacher action books. As per usual, Reacher is smarter, stronger, and faster than everyone else. The women love him and the bad guys fear him.
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder – David Grann. A British ship, part of an effort to cause trouble for the Spanish, wrecks off the coast of South America, leaving survivors stranded on a desolate island in Patagonia. They don’t play nicely with one another. Members of the warring groups manage to get back to Great Britain and tell conflicting tales.
• The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music – Dave Grohl. An autobiography by Foo Fighters front man, Dave Grohl. He seems like a good guy, and he has some stories to tell.
• This Time Tomorrow – Emma Straub. Fiction about a woman turning 40, mostly focused on her relationship with her father. Time travel is a plot device. I liked this one a fair bit.
• Pines – Blake Crouch. Crouch is a good author and this one was decent, but it wasn’t among my favorites of his work. An FBI agent comes to in a little town where he was doing an investigation. But things get weird and all is not what it seems.
• Fairytale – Stephen King. King is at the top of the heap for a reason. He produces quickly and consistently. A kid helps a cranky old man and ends up finding a portal to a fantasy land that needs his help.
• The 90s – Chuck Klosterman. A nostalgic recounting of the decade. Like any retrospective, it has to simplify. And, looking back always minimizes the things we were afraid of (because we survived them) and highlights the things that were cool or interesting (because the mundane isn’t worth mentioning.)
• Light Bringer – Pierce Brown. The sixth installment of the Red Rising series. If you like that kind of science fiction, it’s a great series and Light Bringer was one of the stronger books.
• John Dies at the End – David Wong. Kind of wacky, kind of gory. A surreal story that was funny but, if I’m honest, not one of my favorites.
• A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over the Heartland and the Woman Who Stopped Them – Timothy Egan. While there are some details about the prior history of the Klan and some of the doings in other places, this is mostly an account of D.C. Stephenson and the rapid rise and fall of the Klan in Indiana. Very well told and right in my wheelhouse. Timely as well inasmuch as some of the social dynamics that let Stephenson thrive seem to be problematic once again.
• Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth – Reza Aslan. A pretty interesting account of the historical life of Jesus, as near as we can tell.
• Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan – Herbert Bix. This is one that I’m very happy to have read, but it was a bit like homework. The book spends a good amount of time on Hirohito’s upbringing and sets the stage with enough detail about the Meiji era as well as his father’s reign and how those informed the early part of Hirohito’s reign. One thing leads to another and, before long, Japan’s acquisition of chunks of China is proceeding apace. Then it has the tiger by the tail. Domestic politics were such that Hirohito and those in his circle didn’t see a way (and it’s not clear they had any appetite to do so in any event) to back away from imperial expansionism without support at home collapsing. They seemed to have kind of known that they had no clear exit plan once they attacked the U.S.
• Termination Shock – Neal Stephenson. One of Stephenson’s more recent books. A Texas billionaire who made his money with Buc-ee’s style gas stations shoots a bunch of sulfur into the air in order to slow down global warming.
• Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The story follows some of the stars of “hard action sports.” Basically death matches where individuals convicted of rape and murder are put in a reality TV, gladiator setting. If they survive long enough, they get their freedom. Mostly, they don’t. The story – particularly the footnotes – provides a lot of criticism of our own, actual prison system.
• Lost in the Valley of Death – Harley Rustad. This has an “Into the Wild” vibe about it. Young man wanders around rather than getting a job. It doesn’t end well.
• Boys from Biloxi – John Grisham. A Grisham page turner. It follows the lives of two kids from Biloxi who grow up into adults on opposite sides of the legal system.