Book 7: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

When I started reading this book, I worried that I might not be able to follow all of it because my knowledge of the Troubles in Northern Ireland was so limited (along with my general knowledge of Irish independence and history). It starts with a pretty narrow focus on one disappeared woman and a few key individuals who played major roles in the IRA in the late sixties and seventies, and gradually broadens the scope, until by the end of the book I wanted to go back to the beginning and reread it immediately, because now I actually had the context I needed for understanding everything. 

This isn't a criticism at all; it's actually one of my favorite things about the book and the way that it builds a world for someone who came in with practically no political understanding of how the Good Friday Agreement came to be and how contentious it was, and how impossible a conflict between neighborhoods and streets can be to navigate, no matter what your religion or position. It's also a murder mystery, and the final third of the novel has a series of reveals that I truly didn't know where they could possibly land. 

I started reading this in the fall and continued into the winter in part because there's a miniseries dramatizing the book, which I wanted to watch after I had read this, and I'm really glad I experienced the narratives in that order. The show is also very good, but I think that my experience of watching the show was deepened significantly by having read the book first. The story itself is highly compelling, but the structure the book gives the story is so effective and so impressive, and I'm already tempted to do a full reread. It's my favorite kind of narrative nonfiction.

Grade: A 

Book 13: Out of Office by Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel

Boy, this book. I'm not entirely sure what I expected from this book exactly, beyond it being an overview of how "working from home" worked before the pandemic and how it works now as we enter the third year of the pandemic and how it could work in the future. And to its great credit, it's not a book that attempts to argue that employees are the ones who can and should be "optimizing" how remote work functions for white collar office workers; it's very clear about the fact that issues with remote work are systemic and institution based rather than on the backs of individuals, and therefore organizations and policymakers have the power to change how they work. But being focused on that source of responsibility also made it a deeply depressing read for me at the moment. It's not intended to be; they describe their view of the future of work as being cautiously hopeful, precisely because so many industries are in flux at the moment and that can be fertile ground for change. But the book's historical overview of how the concept of work (and office work specifically) has changed over the past century in the U.S. was so upsetting and it made me feel like what even is the point of any of this, all jobs suck. Which I definitely understand is more of a reflection of my own state of mind about work rather than a rational reflection on what work of any kind may look like in a year or five years or ten. However, it definitely also pointed out a fundamental flaw with how I want to engage with nonfiction at the moment: I want ways to fix intractable problems but I also want to be able to believe those fixes are possible and aren't just wishful thinking called "self-empowerment." And those kinds of solutions feel like they're in short supply at the moment! None of which is the book's fault, but also I don't know if I'm actually able to read these kinds of books at the moment the way they should be read.  

Grade: A

Book 71: Drive by Daniel H. Pink

A pop psychology book! I read a ton of these ten or fifteen years ago and then, much like memoirs, that genre began to feel a bit played out for me. This was a book I had read the first fifty or so pages of at some point and then never finished. And now I have! It was both very interesting, and slightly discouraging. The basic gist of it is that the things we tend to think should motivate people--direct monetary rewards and fear of punishment, primarily--are actually extremely unsuccessful except under very specific situations, and this applies basically equally to tasks we can take some intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction from, and ones that are mindless drudgery. We crave the innate reward of learning something or otherwise creating from the former kind of work, and value autonomy and control, rather than threat of punishment or a reward incentive, from the latter. Paying a kid to read more rarely works, but allowing a kid to select the kinds of books they want to read quite possibly will. 

The reason I found this book discouraging is because so little of our society is set up with any of these concepts in mind. Our entire economy is one big punishment/reward system, even the 'good' jobs that allow either for expression or autonomy. This fall has felt like one big flashlight on problems we seem able to recognize and yet not solve, and this book just made that feel even more obvious. It was hard to know how to apply much if any of what the book was suggesting, even if it did give me a greater appreciation for why I love doing puzzles for no 'reason' or write for free. A good book, if not one with a clearly identifiable next step. 

Grade: A 

Book 26: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

A book about the longterm impacts of trauma on people's brains and bodies was certainly an interesting thing to read at the height of the pandemic in New York City. It's a very good book, with a lot of fascinating insight into the development of the fields of trauma psychology and psychiatry, but it did leave me thinking 'oh wow okay so there's just going to be so much trauma to deal with on the other side of this, great.'

I found this book interesting both in terms of how it made me look at my own life and responses to trauma, but also in thinking about this area of study and work and how underserved it is, and whether it's an area I would want to work. This has been something I've tossed around for many years at this point, with the same issues always stopping me: it would take a ton of work and effort and money, and the system is so broken. One of the most affecting aspects of this book was the description of how hard it is to get anything done because of politics and policy surrounding mental health (not just in the U.S., but in particular here), and it feels like both an impossible thing to dedicate your life to, and also something that's actually worth doing so. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, and also found it deeply affecting, on multiple levels.

Grade: A

Book 16: The Body by Bill Bryson

This is another one of Bryson's broad book of information, this time about the human body, from both a scientific and historical point of view. He is a very strong history of science writer, exploring how and when we learned various scientific information, and is able to contextualize that information in interesting and often funny ways.

I have to say that I'm very glad I read this book in February, before the world exploded, because reading about how fragile and frankly insane our bodies are and how little keeps them working properly was at time anxiety-producing when I wasn't living through a global pandemic, and well. We all know what happened next. But it was an entertaining read, and a good companion book to the Sawbones podcast, which does much the same thing only with medical history rather than simply anatomical history.

Grade: A 

Book 1: The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre

A friend of mine mentioned reading this last year, and I put it on hold at the library without really wondering too much about what it would end up revealing. He said that it was an interesting look at how the Myers-Briggs test was created, and it certainly was that, but it's also a completely bonkers history of how personality as a concept was thought of from the early twentieth century all the way up until the 21st.

One of the major revelations of the book is that there is practically no scientific basis for any aspects of the test, or of the four major choices that determine whether you're an E or an I, a T or a P, and so on. The questionnaire was created and then revised repeatedly by a mother and then her daughter; the mother, Katherine Briggs, was initially interested in codifying a route to salvation, and then became completely obsessed with the theories of Carl Jung, whose teachings she adapted liberally for her personality indicator. She wrote stories about a Jungian character falling in love with another man, and their tragic fate, and practiced psychoanalysis without any formal training or knowledge beyond what she read in Jung's books on people she knew in her town. She also typed her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who brought the test to the government during WWII as a part of a training program for spies. It might have easily been lost forever after the war, but it managed to stay alive in various university testing settings for long enough to be resurrected in the 1970s, just in time for the cult of self-actualization courses, and from there it was a perfect fit for the kind of corporate culture matching and sorting.

Myers-Briggs now functions as a sort of scientific-feeling kind of horoscope, one that purports to illuminate aspects of yourself based on static personality traits that don't vary from test to test, or change with age or circumstance. It hold the same kind of appeal of a horoscope, though: an easy to obtain explanation for why you are the way you are, and who else is like you, and what sort of role your fundamental essence makes you ideal for. I found myself both completely appalled by the lack of substance this entire methodology was founded on, and bizarrely proud of these two women, who were upper middle class housewives married to professionals, who managed to create an entirely new belief system simply out of the strength of their own belief in it. And yet the test itself can be used to categorize and limit people in extremely crude and damaging ways, and was built upon fairly regressive beliefs about gender and race and class. I came away from the book feeling like I needed to reject it completely, and also extremely tempted to take the indicator one more time, just to be told who I actually am, by someone with no authority to do so.

Grade: A

Book 48: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

This is a book that examines how we use language on the internet, and specifically, how it's different from past usage but not actually as completely all new and original as we'd like to think. It looks at how the internet (and social media in particular) creates a public, informal form of writing that's much closer to how we speak than more formal writing is, but that is actually quite connected to how we've always used written language in more informal settings. It views this through the lens of our internet age, which is both a matter of our literal chronological age, but also involves when in the internet life cycle we became fluent (or didn't) in online writing formats and standards.

I really enjoyed this book because it's one that's written about what I think of as my culture by someone who, to me, actually gets it. The result is a book that feels both extremely familiar and almost intuitive and also deeply satisfying, because it acknowledges a thing that I feel to be true and explains how it happened and why it's true. The overlap with the study of codeswitching, and the way people tailor their language to their audience, often unconsciously, is also really interesting to me, because there never used to be an assumption that how we communicate in one setting needed to be the way we communicate in all settings. The attempt by Facebook and other online corporations to codify people as having one identity, one story about themselves, and most importantly, one way of telling that story, broke down because no one actually behaves like that in any reality. The book was a very nice blend of new information and new ways of looking at things I already knew, sometimes without consciously knowing I knew it.

Grade: A 

Book 42: Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

The subtitle of this book is "The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle," which gives the reader a pretty good sense of what kind of book it is. But unlike a lot of more classic self-help books, it actually acknowledges and references the systemic oppression and gendered expectations that so often lead to burnout in women (and non-binary people who are viewed by others as women). I read a lot of self-help in my early twenties, and stopped reading it in my late twenties when they didn't seem to make a difference other than to make me feel bad for failing in ways I hadn't even known I was before reading a book. But most self-help starts from the place of Personal Responsibility, the idea that if we just own our own emotions and reactions and so forth, we can overcome anything, no matter what the external obstacles may be. And that's a nice idea, kind of, in a world where we're not in control of the soup of misogyny and racism and homophobia and classism we live in and the way that all of those biases are built into our institutions and expectations of our personal relationships. But it's also gaslighting, and either incredibly naive or extremely manipulative to assert that we shouldn't be impacted by any of that. I found it extraordinarily affirming to have those issues actually addressed as real, and the chapters on the misogyny of burnout and where body image fits into that were both really affecting.

This book kind of splits the difference between being a book that examines the cultural conditions that allow for burnout, and a how-to guide for ways of processing our stress, identifying stressors we can control and ones we can't and formulating an approach to each, and doing the self-care that enables us to heal and live our purpose, not the catchphrase. I found it both really confronting and intuitive, and for once it was written by authors who felt like women I could know (or would want to know). There's a lot that rang true for me in terms of when I've felt the most satisfaction and fulfilled, and what I was doing for myself during those times, and it was also challenging in terms of pointing out that changing certain aspects of my life is long overdue, in both big ways and small. It also made me want to read two of the other books on my current list, Down Girl and Health at Every Size, both of which feel frightening to me for a variety of reasons. This year I've opened myself up to adding additional books to my reading list when I come across books that sound compelling, because I don't view reading as a chore but rather something I chose to do for a variety of reasons. And one of the results is how so many of the books I've read this year have been in communications with each other. This book in some ways is the practical version of How to Do Nothing, but I think it's more that they're approaching the same question of how to live a meaningful life from two very different angles. I recommend them both.

Grade: A 

Book 41: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Ah, the irony of reading this book while feeling completely overwhelmed and like I wanted to do both nothing and everything (and therefore nothing) at once.

This book is about that phenomenon, and specifically the way the attention economy subsists off of our insatiable need to refresh and the reaction cycle of modern life. But it's a broader rumination on what it means to give our attention to something, and what we find there and how. It's a book that's deeply grounded in Oakland and the East Bay. It's not a prescription, or what I would consider to be a self-help book, but it is something of an invitation: an invitation to bring awareness to where we are, physically, and redirecting attention.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time writing about this book. So much of it is actually an examination of art, and public spaces, and the idea that people and societies need both public time and space to be able to live and think and breathe, and that when everything is optimized and each interaction can be viewed as a networking opportunity or a side hustle rather than simply a conversation they lose their actual inherent value of connection. It made me think a lot about why I value fandom and fanfic so much, both because it's a community that is built out of love and not capitalism, but also because when I engage with fandom online, on twitter and elsewhere, I know the context for my interactions. I'm not trying to project a constant all-encompassing expression of myself, the way Facebook wants my public facing posts to do; I'm not trying to tailor my comments for my family and my co-workers and my college friends and my childhood friends and my fandom friends all at once. There's that tweet that goes around asking "is your online self the same as your real life self," and the answer is always, always "well that depends on the context in which we meet in real life." If you saw me at work, probably not. If you saw me at a concert or a hockey game or a con, then almost certainly, because that's the context we know each other in online, too.

I think that's why, to the extent a social media fast or permanent flounce is appealing (and it can be), I've never seriously considered it, and not just because becoming Thoreau and leaving society behind (while still having my laundry delivered) isn't actually a morally just decision, in my opinion. I like the context of my social media, and while I do wish that it was completely non-commercialized, I also feel like my community has colonized the existing space and taken it over, in a way that a site like twitter deserved to have colonized.

What does any of this have to do with doing nothing? Well, it's less of a call to simplify, or retreat, or detox, and more of a call to do nothing by noticing more, by deepening the attention we do give. She describes how that has occurred for her, and what that looks like in her interactions with the world, but it isn't a to do list, which I both value and find frustrating, because of course it would be so much easier if there was just one single solution to any of this. But I found the actual reading of the book itself to be an example of it; I have read many of the books I've read this year while half paying attention to them, and for some of them that's an indication of how engaging I found the book itself, and for some it's me not reading them well. But I had to sit with this book, and grapple with it, and that focus I think, for me, was the point.

Grade: A  

Book 38: I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum

This is a collection of essays and profiles written by a television critic, who came to her life as a critic via an abandoned English PhD and being a fan in the early days of internet fandom. She approaches television from the point of view of someone who had absorbed early on that television storytelling wasn't considered to be worthy of analysis and critique, and then pushed back against that. But she also rejects the idea that there is only some television worth analyzing and loving, television that is almost always male-focused and often bleak and cynical and mechanical in its violence: the antihero "not like the other guys" stories that didn't start with The Sopranos but certainly gained a cultural respectability via that show.

I enjoyed her pieces about shows that I watched and often loved (in particular her piece on Hannibal), but I also loved reading her thoughts on shows I haven't seen, because so much of her focus is on what television means to us, and how we can see what stories we're telling ourselves about reality through this particular medium. It wasn't always an easy read, both because there are essays that were written and published before and after the 2016 election, and also before and after Me Too in the fall of 2017, and obviously both of those events are still reverberating in our art and in our daily lives. She also takes a look at what it was to be a young girl who grew up being taught to focus on men, and men's lives, and valuing that perspective, and how it really did take something earth-shattering to fully examine the price that extracts. But at its heart, this is a book that deeply engages both with narrative and also why narratives matter to people, and there is nothing that matters as much to me as that. I really enjoyed this book, end to end.

Grade: A

Book 33: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

I went into this book expecting to like it, but man, it really left me reeling emotionally. I had read one of the essays in the book before I started it, a piece about growing up in Houston and attending a megachurch and the connection between the divine and the euphoria of club drug use, and it was extremely good and well written, but it also didn't feel all that relatable to my personal experience. It was a window into someone else's life, which I enjoyed, but was also able to maintain an emotional distance from. And boy was that not the case of every essay in this book!

The first one, about how we exist online and how that affects basically everything, was disconcertingly relevant to my experience, in part because it reflects the experience of the internet and blogs and even twitter as being something that for me, personally, I still consider to be a net positive, even as I view it as a net negative for basically everyone as a whole. That contradiction is basically impossible to resolve, and the essay doesn't try to, or at least doesn't succeed, but it's such a familiar exploration, only about ten times as insightful as I usually feel when I'm arguing with myself in the shower.

The essay that punched me in the face, though, was the one about why the best heroines in novels are always girls, or at most, on the very cusp of womanhood. It was such a familiar and wrenching look at what is possible fictionally for (white, straight) girls, and what immediately becomes impossible as soon as they're old enough to be married and become mothers. The thruline from that essay to her piece on women's constant optimization, via the right salad and the right exercise and clean living rather than dieting, continues on through a piece on me too and straight through until the end, in a piece on wedding culture that I thought wouldn't affect me nearly as much as it did. I don't know. Each individual essay is worth reading, but it truly is greater as a whole, because each piece feeds into the next one and reflects back what you were thinking about an essay you had read two hours prior.

There's a feeling of constantly, desperately trying to explain where we are and why as a culture, like if we can only articulate it well enough we can fix it, and I don't actually believe that anymore, but the relief of reading someone else's brilliant efforts at the same task made me want to believe in it again.

Grade: A

Book 31: Range by David Epstein

This book absolutely blew me away. I first heard about it when the author was interviewed on the Longform Podcast, which interviews nonfiction writers about their careers and process and all that, and it's essentially taking a look at the argument for being a generalist vs. being a specialist.

The intro looks at and then kind of dismisses the ten thousand hours explanation of genius, where Tiger Woods is a brilliant golfer because he got in the necessary number of hours of practice in specialized, repeated drills when he was very young. The counterargument is Roger Federer, who played lots of different kinds of sports when he was a kid, and didn't focus on tennis to the exclusion of others until he was a teenager. But the broader, more applicable lesson is that broad, flexible learning is the thing that human brains are actually exceptionally good at, when compared with computers, and attempting to become experts via drills and rote learning actually just results in us being not very good robots instead of exceptional humans.

Every chapter explores this concept of breadth having a much greater value than people want to believe to be the case in a variety of settings, and I found the book to be both fascinating and extremely challenging and also a bit scary, because of how much the central argument of the book feels almost impossible to implement in academia or scientific research or policy development, to say nothing of individual lives. Also, the chapter on the women musicians of 17th and 18th century Venice alone is well worth reading. Just thinking about this book makes me want to re-read it.

Grade: A  

Book 20: Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris

The subtitle of this book is "Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," which gives a pretty good sense of the thrust of the argument made in this book. It purports to be a book intent on explaining why Millennials are the way they are, using facts and macroeconomic analysis, but it is also very much a philosophical point of view desperately seeking factual support, rather than a conclusion being discovered via research. The entire thing feels reverse engineered, which may be satisfying to read if you agree with the arguments being made, but doesn't exactly make it well supported or especially illuminating.

Harris's essential argument boils down to the theory that millennials were born into a world in which there was ever greater competition for even fewer spots, that the middle class had ceased to have opportunities that the Boomers had enjoyed, and that millennials have become so accustomed to needing to go the extra mile in order to achieve anything that they've fundamentally and permanently undervalued their own labor. He gets some credit for actually understanding that, at the time of writing his book, millennials were anywhere from 20 to 35 years old, but he still fell prey to the impulse to equate millennial with young whenever convenient. He spends a short amount of the book acknowledging that our view of who a millennial is makes a bunch of assumptions about whose lives we mean when we reference generations: American, largely white, largely "middle class," largely suburban. He also acknowledges that many of the shifts from Gen X to millennial have causes beyond the economic hollowing out of the American middle class, but is fairly uninterested in exploring any of them. It is a book that is almost instantaneously dated; it was written mostly during 2016 but came out in 2017, and he makes no bones about the fact that in his view the entire world is now permanently fucked and that there's no way out for anyone, and in fact there hasn't been any way out since these beaten down millennials refused to collectively rise up and overthrow capitalism during the Occupy movement or at the very least by electing Bernie Sanders as president. It is a fundamentally short-sighted view of history that feels so entirely male and white even while it attempts to demonstrate that it recognizes women and people of color I cannot take it seriously. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism in this world, and millennials have in fact been dealt a shitty hand compared with their Boomer parents--but that shitty hand is only especially remarkable if you are one of the white male college educated millennials who thought things would be better for you, specifically. His afterward, in which he describes what he predicts the future will be, only made me shake my head at how limited and limiting his imagination truly is. Things are bad, and finding a path forward is and will be hard. But there is something too close to a celebratory tone of how fucked we all are in his analysis, and a condescending sympathy for those who don't acknowledge this permanent condition, and I stopped talking to dicks like that back when I was in college. I wish this book had actually been what I think a book on this topic really could be.

Grade: C 

Book 17: Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden

I have a whole subcategory of books on my to-read list that are books I heard about on the longform podcast and decided I needed to pick up. This one made the list because I loved the author's interview, and the concept of actually analyzing which kinds of physical recovery techniques make a measurable difference and which ones don't really intrigued me. I am not an athlete, but I am a fan of many sports and someone who is becoming more and more aware of how my body is changing as I get older, and so I read it both with the aim of potentially discovering better ways of living and seeing which tried and true methods are at best placebo effects and at worst actively hinder people.

The answer to the first part of that inquiry is basically that getting a sufficient amount of quality sleep is the most important aspect of any kind of physical recovery, and the aspect other methods of recovery are the least good at mimicking or replacing. Our bodies are simultaneously incredibly adaptable--she goes through a whole section demonstrating that basically as long as our bodies get some kind of food within an incredibly wide period of time post-exertion, our bodies will generally extract the fuel it needs from anything--and also incredibly finicky and demanding, and what it really comes down to is that every body is different, and if you truly believe that something you're doing is making a difference, it probably will, because we're creatures of habit and the placebo effect is real. Most of the things we believe (dehydration kills performance, icing and ibuprofen after exertion and/or injury helps, eating protein within an hour of weight training is vital for gaining muscle) are either probably not true and based on studies funded by industries that only publish the studies that benefit them (and are unconfirmed by independent studies), or are the result of confirmation bias/survivorship bias: we look at how the best athletes in the world train, and assume that their performance is due to their training methods, rather than them being exceptionally talented individuals who would succeed no matter what within a fairly broad framework of methods and techniques, so long as they believed their methods helped. But that's not something that can be marketed, so instead we are told (and believe, no matter how much we tell ourselves we're too smart for this) that Michael Jordan is MJ because he drank Gatorade, and not because he's an exceptionally talented individual.

I actually found the fact that there's no magic pill (aside from sleep) to be extremely reassuring and helpful. It turns out I didn't miss out on a secret that would have made me a natural athlete; bodies are simply different, and the best thing that I can do is actually listen to what my body is telling me it wants or needs, and do my best to provide that. Easier said than done, but at least I won't need to start sitting in ice baths.

Grade: A

Book 26: Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes

This is a pretty straightforward 'how to structure a romance novel' book that I bought because I've had an idea floating through my head for the past year and I was sort of hoping that mapping it out via a beat sheet would help me actually write it. There's some good and useful tips in this book, but my reaction to a bunch of the beats outlined was more along the lines of 'oh, here's the section in a lot of romance novels that I dislike' rather than 'this is how the magic works!' I don't regret buying or reading it, and I think there's some useful structural advice in there, but it feels a bit like a paint by numbers instruction manual that doesn't actually result in a pretty or particularly interesting picture.

Grade: C

Book 24: The Guru Investor by John P. Reese

So this is one of those books which I own because of a friend. Usually in those situations it's because the friend is the recognized author, and in this case my friend is the ghostwriter of this book. I went into it a bit skeptical because it's a personal finance book about how ten money managers/investors have systems to do the thing that historically speaking almost no one manages to do in the long term (beat the market), but I was also curious about it because I am in personal finance fandom and so this stuff is of interest to me. I came out of it slightly less skeptical of the theory but even more firmly convinced that for the vast majority of people, investing in index funds rather than attempting to actively manage your portfolio (or paying someone else to do it) is the way to go.

The structure of the book is basically ten mini-biographies of investors who fall into three main categories, depending on what their investing focus is: value investors, growth investors, and quant investors. All of them managed to beat the market average gain over the lifespan of whatever their fund was/is, and essentially all of them have numbers-based (rather than impulse-based) reasons for holding or selling the particular stocks in their funds, and they make calls based on that. And whether or not their individual methods succeed basically depend on a person's ability to trust that a downturn in a particular fund is temporary, because there's science behind the method, and that the fund will bounce back up eventually.

All of that is fine; it's essentially the same theory as buy and hold in general, only more targeted. But the fundamental appeal of buy and hold in index funds, which track the S&P 500 and don't involve active management and so therefore have very low fees associated with them, is that you don't have to think about or worry whether your method is actually a successful one, or whether the numbers you have based your decisions on are an accurate reflection of how a company is likely to do in the future. Plus, the only way to actively manage picking stocks to buy and sell that isn't just based on hunches and emotions is to do so actively, i.e. spend time and energy managing those investments. And if you want to do that, more power to you! But for the vast majority of people who want to invest in the stock market as a form of saving for retirement, that is almost certainly going to demand more time and energy than you want to give, and cause more anxiety and stress in the process. And if you want to invest in a fund someone else is managing to achieve the same 'better than the market' results, you've got to trust that the additional fees you will pay to own those funds won't be more than the market beat the funds will have, and that the particular fund you pick is actually managed by someone who is following a system and whose system works.

This book was written in 2008, before the financial crisis really hit home, and before it became clear that a lot of the public information that was available about various companies was, in a word, unreliable. I don't doubt any of the information included in the book is accurate, in terms of how much the various funds and methodologies had earned in various points in the market. But I do wonder very much how many of the people invested in those funds were able to stop themselves from cashing out at the bottom of the market because they hadn't been saved from that downturn by the money men in charge. If they had stayed in, they would have made back their money and some. But so did anyone invested in index funds, without the additional fees or worries. The structure of the book and the sentence-level writing was as good as I would have expected from my friend's writing ability. But I can't say that I came away convinced by the central arguments of it, or inspired to do more active investing with my money.

Grade: C

Book 18: The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel

This book examines the experiences and the reporting of women newspaper and magazine correspondents who covered World War II across the globe. It's a topic I had never really considered or thought about before reading the book, even though women entered many work forces during the war while so many men were off fighting, so it made perfect sense once I started reading it that war correspondent would be another kind of job women would step into. Journalism and nonfiction writing was also a field that women had begun entering during the 1920's when cultural expectations of a woman's role in the world had started to shift, and that meant there were experienced women journalists who were ready and able to fight for the opportunity to go cover the biggest stories of the times when war broke out.

The main difficulty with a book like this is just how broad a story it is. The book covers dozens of women working over a decade and in numerous locations, and at times it ends up feeling like a recitation of facts about what happened when without enough of a coherent thru-line. It would often highlight a writer doing work in Poland in 1938 and then return to her ten chapters and five years later working in England, and it was difficult at times to keep the stories straight or feel connected to any of the women as individuals. I also found it frustrating how every woman was described physically, and the attention given to their romantic lives. It wasn't irrelevant, since often they were traveling with their husbands who were also journalists, or had left husbands behind who were often quite unenthusiastic about having a woman correspondent for a wife, but it felt like a shorthand that was used to differentiate the women, rather than their work. I understand why the book was written in a chronological format, but I think it might have been a better book if it had focused on fewer women and gone further in-depth with each of them individually, rather than trying to give a broad overview of everything at once. Basically, this book attempts to be a biography of about thirty women all at once, while also giving an overview of the war as a whole, and it ends up feeling slightly shallow and disjointed as a result.

Still, I'm really glad that I read the book. While I do think that attempting to cover so many women weakens the overall narrative, it did a great job of making clear just how wide-ranging and far-flung the war (and therefore the people covering the war) was. Most of the books or movies I've read or watched about WWII are understandably narrower in scope, but that makes it easy not to appreciate what it really meant that the entire world was at war. This book definitely made me want to read more in-depth history books about specific events and locations that are only touched on in this one, and the depiction of just one of the roles that women played during that time was also very interesting and worth exploring.

Grade: B

Book 2: Take Your Eye Off the Puck by Greg Wyshynski

In the past year or so, I started watching hockey again. It had been a sport I watched with friends in high school (and I played street hockey very badly with the same friends), but last season I started watching it again much more frequently and intensely. At a certain point, I realized that while I knew the basic rules of the game and had a pretty good idea of what was bad vs. what was good, I was missing a lot of the nuance. So I started listening to podcasts and reading articles on tactics and hockey stats, and that was how I heard about this book.

Greg Wyshynski is a hockey sportswriter, and his style is very much of the old school sportswriter genre--there's not a simile in the world he hasn't met and loved. But I found his book to be very well organized and provided a structure for understanding aspects of hockey that I had observed but hadn't necessarily understood just from watching games. I've found myself relying upon how he laid out various points when trying to explain rules or what have you to friends who are new to the sport, and I really like having that sort of vocabulary at hand instead of flailing around for how to describe a thing I understand instinctively but don't have the words for. He's also someone who grew up about thirty miles from where I did and is only a couple of years older than I am, so I get all of his cultural references and in general there's something about him that makes me feel home again in a way that few things have since My Chemical Romance or seeing Clerks for the first time. Most people probably won't have that sort of fondness for him baked in the way I do, but even without that, if you're a newish hockey fan (or even an old hand at hockey who wants a refresher course on certain topics), I really recommend his book.

Grade: A

Book 80: Welcome to My World by Johnny Weir

Some autobiographies you read because you don't know much about the subject. Others you read because you're so fond of the subject that you want to read everything about them. For me, this book is squarely in the second category.

Johnny Weir is a figure skater who has had a 'love him or hate him' career. He refused to conform to many of the unspoken standards of his sport, didn't play nice with judges and officials, and had a self-destructive streak a mile wide at times. He was also an incredibly beautiful and accomplished skater who routinely got fucked over in a sport that fundamentally lacks the objectivity of many others.

My sister-in-law gave this book to me for my birthday almost five years ago, and one of the really interesting things about it is how out of date it is as a result. It was written when Johnny had no idea what his post-Olympics life would be like, and so the narrative feels a bit incomplete. That's also because while Johnny did have his triumphs in his career, it wasn't by winning the Olympic medal (or medals) that we're used to judging skaters by. But it's also nice to read his autobiography when it's a bit out of date, because I know how his life has grown and changed in the public eye.

More than anything else, reading this now made me reflect on how much more him he seems now, and how things have changed for him as an openly gay man. Figure skating (and sports in general) still have a long way to go in terms of accepting LGBT athletes, but it's also very easy to see the progress, and to note the shift that has been made in culture.

Grade: B

Book 79: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

One of the challenging aspects of attempting to read a certain number of books per week is that some books are obviously going to take much more time than that. This book is one of them. 

I've read a number of other books by Bryson; his books on travel are delightful and well-known for a reason, and I really enjoyed his short biography on Shakespeare, as well. This book is ambitious on a whole other level. It's a book that manages to be both an overview of a wide number of scientific concepts and also the history of science: how we know what we do (and what we don't know). The focus on how we discovered and expanded upon (and also were proven completely wrong) scientific knowledge gives a context to many scientific principles that I hadn't thought about since I was in high school. His writing is crisp and clear and entertaining, and he is extremely good at telling the story rather than listing dry facts. 

The book was unsurprisingly a combination of a review of things I had once known and a completely new exploration of other topics that I had never learned (or had forgotten completely). Beyond the big names like Newton and Darwin and Einstein, I was fairly unfamiliar with the biographies of many of the scientists who were so influential. One aspect about those biographies that I loved was the revelation of how much we know as a result of longstanding feuds between individuals who were driven by little more than spite. On the other hand, I found myself newly enraged at the constant dismissal of women scientists by their peers and the institutions and organizations of their disciplines for centuries. Bryson certainly doesn't skip over this reality, but it made me want to read a book just like this one that only focused on the contributions of women to scientific discovery that have been neglected and ignored and deliberately hidden for far too long. 

I bought this book almost ten years ago while I was in Germany, but somehow never got around to reading it until now. I'm glad I finally did. 

Grade: A