2018 reading highlights
I’ve been tracking my reading for the last decade, and in 2018 I set a new personal record for books I read (19). I read a lot of awesome books last year, and inspired by my friend Ruth, I’d like to share a roundup of the thematic highlights.
Environmental history
Nature’s Metropolis (Bill Cronon): One of the canonical works of American environmental history. Cronon uses Chicago as his case study to show the relationships between the rural hinterlands and urban center. I have a new appreciation for the development of grain elevators after reading this.
The Thousand-year Flood (David Welky): This is a history of the 1937 Ohio River flood. It’s always struck me as a little weird how much literature concerns the Mississippi River, and how comparatively little there is on the Ohio. As I get into water issues locally and regionally, I’m trying to increase my knowledge of the Ohio River. Much of the current US environmental disaster response policy was forged during the New Deal, and this is a great look at how that played out during a massive wintertime flood that dramatically affected Cincinnati, Louisville, and Paducah.
The Hidden Life of Trees (Peter Wohlleben): If you need a gentle, lovely work of quiet non-fiction to make you feel better about the shitty times we live in, pick this up. Wohlleben discusses how trees live in community with one another, how they communicate, and how things like fungi are important members of forest communities.
Nuclear non-fiction and apocalyptic fiction
The Power (Naomi Alderman): This was a hell of a book to read within the fallout from the Me Too movement. A dystopia in which women gain the power to electrocute men, it’s a cautionary tale of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The Doomsday Machine (Daniel Ellsberg): Before he was known as the force behind the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was a nuclear policy researcher with the RAND Corporation. There was some wild shit in here, like the time RAND researchers came up with a plan to thwart a Soviet missile attack by STOPPING EARTH’S ROTATION. This book got a bit dense at times, but if you need some more nightmare juice for more sleepless nights for the remainder of the Trump presidency… pick this up!
Almighty (Dan Zak): Protests are often (weirdly, in my opinion) derided as being symbolic performance, and little more than that. I’ve never been moved by this argument, but if you’re someone who earnestly makes it, then I hope you’d at least be willing to admit that protesting the biggest symbol of state violence – nuclear weapons – is at least a hell of a target. If you’re not familiar with the Manhattan Project (i.e., the US military-academic-government project to create the atomic bomb), the Plowshares Movement (the most colorful anti-nuclear protest movement), or the Catholic Workers (a Catholic social justice movement midwifed by Dorothy Day, a Catholic anarchist and someone who I regard alongside Martin Luther King as an American prophet), then Almighty is a damn good crash course into these important chapters in nuclear history, and religious left history, centering around an ill-fated protest involving a veteran, a housepainter, and a nun at Oak Ridge.
Inequality
Titan (Ron Chernow): I’ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of energy and fossil fuels, and it became pretty clear that at some point, you have to dive into the history of Standard Oil, the first major oil company started by John D. Rockefeller. There still has never been any American as wealthy as John D. Rockefeller was, and there’s a pretty compelling argument one can make that Rockefeller and Standard Oil charted much of the path for American capitalism, environmental attitudes, and worker exploitation through the 20th century. I was disappointed by some of the paths Chernow took (as a socialist, long passages about the furnishing decisions of the Rockefeller estate at the expense of shorter passages about the Ludlow Massacre and other labor horror stories sent me into periodic fits of rage), but overall this is a fascinating book.
Automating Inequality (Virginia Eubanks): Ed Summers recommended this to me, and I know that anything Ed recommends about data and algorithms is going to be good as hell (good as in well-written, the insights are usually terrifying). Eubanks dives into a few case studies about how seemingly benign attempts by the state to automate things like benefits for people with disabilities, predicting the future likelihood for abuse to children tracked by family services, and triaging services for homeless people can lead to reinforcing the very inequalities that supposedly “neutral” technology was supposed to ameliorate.
Winners Take All (Anand Giridharadas): I have not been able to shut up about this book since I read it, and if there is one book right now that I wish everyone I know would read, it’s this one. You can read an essay-length version of Giridharadas’s book in his recent essay in The Guardian. This book delves into the favorite farce of rich people too high on their own supply – that they are best positioned to solve the problems they created in the first place. I loved this book for far too many reasons to list here, but one of the passages that sticks out in my brain is so vivid I have to share it with y’all here:
In her reluctance to be the only fool, Tisch was revealing the hold that the status quo had on her. Again and again, she had voiced an ideal for which in the end she was unwilling to sacrifice. It was important to her to feel superior to her rich friends, but she was unwilling to rush out in front of them and be the only one not to take advantage of a system she knew to be wrong. Her repeated confessions that she will not be the one to bring about the world that she swears she believes in sent a message to Darren Walker: If he wants a fairer system, he is going to have to seek it in spite of people like her, not with them at his side; he might have their moral support, but he could not count on them to make the decisions to change the system that made them everything that they are. “The people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it?” Tisch said at one point. “They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it.” Was there anything she could imagine that would convince them otherwise—that could inspire them to pursue a fairer system? “Revolution, maybe,” she said.
Community repair
The Romance of American Communism (Vivan Gornick): One of my DSA friends recommended this to me, and after Winners Take All, this might be my second favorite book I read in 2018. Vivian Gornick grew up in a Jewish Communist home in New York, which gave her a great deal of familiarity with the subject material of this book. In the 70s she went back and interviewed tons of ex-Communist Party (CPUSA) members, and using pseudonyms, wrote up their stories (and often embellished them). It’s written in a somewhat dated style, but the stories are so wild and entertaining, thrilling and disturbing, that it’s hard to put down. I see so many echoes of what Gornick’s subjects talked about in today’s left, from the good (the thrill of winning unlikely victories) to the mundane (the basic tasks of organizing) to the bad (meetings that go on forever) to the ugly (mansplaining and party expulsion).
Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam): The popular sociological text of “why are Americans so lonely?” This book is nearly 20 years old so I guess now maybe it’s a classic?? While obviously some of it is dated, there is so much useful information in here. If, like me, you are a young person affiliated with an older institution (voluntary, religious, community, etc) that is wringing its hands about why “young people aren’t involved these days,” it’s good to remember that this trend has actually been going on for a long time, and can’t be blamed on millennials!
Conflict is not Abuse (Sarah Schulman): I felt really conflicted (pun intended) about this book. Schulman has some excellent arguments about the conflation of conflict with abuse and harm, when it is important to distinguish between the two. At the same time, I think she formulates what she believes to be a universal ethical framework based on her specific life experience in a way I often took serious issue with. Ultimately, this was a very thought-provoking book that forced me to think about how I deal with conflict resolution in real life.
What am I reading for 2019?
I don’t tend to stick to a reading plan (except for the year I only read women authors) – I’m generally a bit of a meandering reader, and often start new titles based on whatever titles are currently available through my library’s eBook program. I tend to juggle a few titles at a time – typically one I’m reading from most days on my bus commute to work, and a couple others on the back burner. Most of the books I read last year were eBooks. I occasionally worry I’m getting out of the habit of reading print books, particularly because a lot of books I eventually want to read are only available in analog.
Right now, I’m really interested in reading about water issues, filling gaps in my knowledge of important political history, and boning up on religious left thinkers. I recently finished a book about the Flint water crisis, am in the middle of a book about the French Revolution, and am occasionally dipping into Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. My only reading goal this year is to beat last year’s reading record – so if I hit 20, I’ll consider it a success.
Categorised as: life