Books - Matt S Clancy

Every year since 2017, I have put together a loose ranking of the books I read (or, more often, listen to).

2023

Narratives

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link: Modern fairy tales – I want to read everything she’s written now.
Middlemarch by George Eliot: The back half was quite a resonant read in the fallout of the FTX collapse.
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley translations: I’m planning to give it a third read soon.
The Children of Turin by J.R.R. Tolkien: Listened to the audio version read by Christopher Lee(!); successful creation of a new medieval epic.
Blindsight by Peter Watts: I didn’t love reading it (too verbose), but the ideas have stuck with me.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky: What a page-turner!
Uprooted by Naomi Novik: Really original, and a great depiction of magic.
Ghosts by Edith Wharton: Each short story premise is memorable, though there isn’t a ton besides those unsettling premises.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu: Hated-hated-hated the beginning section about an amusement park for dying children, but grudgingly conceded the author put us through hell so that we could understand the characters who went through hell too.
The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem: A good yarn.
Ducks by Kate Beaton: A window into a life I knew nothing about.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: The beginning was really moving, but it lost me in the end.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I’ve never loved the style, but the ending packs a punch and it is immaculately calibrated in its ambiguity.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein: Prescient and glad I read it, but I didn’t like the “everyone is such a fool but me” vibe.
Chip War by Chris Miller: I loved Miller’s more conceptual book on the collapse of the USSR, but this felt to me like “this happened then this happened then this happened.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: Hasn’t stuck with me.

Narratives of the American Civil War

Grant by Ron Chernow: Subjectively, I was near tears by the end; objectively, learned a ton about the post-war difficulties, which I have long been ignorant of.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass: Classic for a reason!
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin: Many more books should be contrasting portraits; I enjoyed reading Grant and Lee biographies at the same time for similar reasons.
Frederick Douglass – Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight: An incredible life.
Robert E. Lee by Allen C. Guelzo: Lee was not a man who is curious about the world.

Conceptual Non-Fiction

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell: Excellent presentation of an argument, marshaling historical fact.
Career and Family by Claudia Goldin: Economics and technological change, as drivers of things that actually matter! A masterpiece of research synthesis.
The War on Music by John Mauceri: Why (most of) you don’t like contemporary classical music.
Making Movies by Sidney Lumet: There should be more books that are just about all the decisions you have to make to finish a project.
Nightmare Fuel by Nina Nesseth: I had fun, but a main takeaway was that the science of horror is pretty underbaked.

2022

Narratives

Persuasion by Jane Austen: Classics are classics for a reason!
No one is talking about this by Patricia Lockwood: First half creates it’s own language which successfully evokes the fractured, hurried feeling of being too online; second half puts online life into unflattering, but not dismissive, perspective.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: Appreciate how Mitchell casts aside the western audience surrogate of Jacob de Zoet once it’s no longer needed, and makes an effort to actually enter the lives of the protagonists from their own perspective.
Sunshine by Robin McKinley: Never have vampires been so alien, so lovecraftian. This rating is a bit of a guess of how I would feel if I had not listened on audiobook for the first half; worst reader I’ve ever listened to.
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson: Note to self – somewhat ineffective, even ridiculous, people may be world historical leaders, given the right set of external circumstances.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead: Step into a different world.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel: In some ways, this didn’t quite come together for me, but I quite appreciated the interrogation of what makes something “real” vs. a simulacrum of the thing; Canada as England, fictional stories about our contemporary world, moon colonies, simulations of reality etc.
Slade House by David Mitchell: Delicious spooky atmosphere. A second read; wanted to keep living in Mitchell’s world after Jacob de Zoet.
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell: I really enjoyed this – found it moving and hard to put down – until the absolute downer of an ending sequence.
The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier: Great ending.
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik: A fun world, determined to be an anti-Potter.
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King: I couldn’t put it down, but a book like this demands an iconic antagonist and Barlow can’t deliver.
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll: Everyone knows its scarier to not see the shark, and that the reveal rarely lives up to the anticipation; but I don’t think you can just decline to try? Creepy vibes though!
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson: So long. Apparently I only read the minor Stephenson works?

Conceptual Non-Fiction

The Republic of Beliefs by Kaushik Basu: Intellectually thrilling and a vivid illustration of how excessive focus on the West leads to big blind spots in our theories of how society functions.
The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby: How do you engender dynamism in a centrally planned economy? By fostering competition among your planners.
T.Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez: Kind of a dorky title, but a great story of many threads of evidence from disparate sources coming together to overturn old ideas.
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan: Oh what a wonderful world that coordinate the specialized skills and imaginations of hundreds of niche experts in the service of telling ourselves stories.
Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy by William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe: How to escape a doom spiral of weak state capacity leading to the election of outsiders whose incompetence (and malevolence?) further weaken state capacity .
Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr: How do you engender dynamism in a centrally planned economy? By minimizing the degree of central planning with distributed autonomy, and finding efficient ways to trade information.
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann: A good overview of the many phases of his ideas.
In the Mood for Love by Tony Rayns: A BFI essay about the (excellent) film. If Mad Max is a masterpiece in long-planned execution, In the Mood for Love is one born of long-suffering improvisation.
The Voltage Effect by John A. List: How do you engender dynamism in a centrally planned economy? By running experiments and scaling up the ones that work.
The Exorcist by Mark Kermode: I never appreciated how much of the movie’s mythology stems from the director’s deliberate lies to create buzz.

Art and Photography

There and Back by Jimmy Chin: A life like Jimmy Chin’s is so different from my own. I am glad we both live on this planet.
Des Oiseaux by Fenti Sammallahti: Evokes the sense that birds inhabit the human world while remaining supremely indifferent to its concerns.

2021

Narratives

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Beloved for good reason.
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel: Perhaps overlong, but a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem: Much scarier and unsettling than I had expected
Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green: Absolutely engrossing in the first half, less so in the second
The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary: A delightful romance with depth
Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore: A one-of-a-kind rocketship that takes you into the narrative stratosphere.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vine: Excellent portrait of a near-future world on the verge of singularity. Better on a second read because my expectations were properly calibrated.
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. LeGuin: The dragon is the star of the show
Carrie by Stephen King: One big anxiety-sadness trip
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty: Excellently done, but too close to the movie to give you much in the way of novelty if you’ve seen it.
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. LeGuin: A proto-feminist fantasy story!
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin: A bit episodic, but a creative new fantasy setting.
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson: Ten Year Anniversary: Bill Waterson is such an idealistic, willful nut.
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson: It takes an army to make a revolution.
Liftoff by Eric Berger: Musk’s gifts – a prophet’s power to lead, an eye for talent, and sociopathic ruthlessness.
Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone: Amazon’s growing bloat.
Power Play by Tim Higgins: See Liftoff.
Mr. Jones by Edith Wharton: A spooky trifle

Conceptual Non-Fiction

The Precipice by Toby Ord: In some ways it’s not as bad as you think, in others its worse.
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman: Accept there is no lifehack to solve your problems.
The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin: Starts strongest, but eventually you have a sense we don’t actually know what economic case there is for space. I suspect we’ll get to orbit a lot more, but Mars will need to wait for us to become rich enough to pay for the luxury of going there for idealistic reasons.

Photography and Art

Full Moon by Michael Light: Outside the boundaries of our atmosphere, the universe is an unrelentingly hostile waste, Lovecraftian in its utter disdain for the things that preoccupy us. That makes what we have all the more special, but sends shivers down my spine as well.

2020

Narratives

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin: “Nobody goes hungry while another eats.” My second read of this. Also fits in well with “Why Not Socialism” and “People’s Republic of Wal-Mart.”
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien: Another re-read. Always wonderful.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: Another re-read. My all time favorite sci-fi book.
The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien: Another re-read.
Slade House by David Mitchell: Fantastic horror story ambience.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: It’s really long; some parts I would probably skim if I re-read, but other parts made me cry.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: This book keeps going up in my estimation. I think this is my third time reading this?
Silas Marner by George Eliot: A great short Christmas tale.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang: Much of this was fantastic, but I didn’t care for the long central story on the lives of digital objects.
Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel: Great to be in this world, but at the end you’re kind of left thinking “what actually happened?”
A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazney: Super fun Halloween pastiche that I will probably revisit again.
SevenEves by Neal Stephenson: Memorably grim, but the last third didn’t work great for me.

Conceptual Non-Fiction

Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein: A great overview of the systemic problems bedeviling American politics. Warning: understanding will not make you feel better about the situation.
Fully Grown by Dietrich Vollrath: An important rebuttal to the rising consensus that we are living amid a great stagnation of technological innovation. I wrote much more about this book here.
The Great Reversal by Thomas Philippon: A good summary of the evidence that the problem of market power in the USA is on the rise.
Why Not Socialism by G.A. Cohen: Argues that socialism, as a method of allocating resources in society, is desirable; though we may lack the social technology to make it work in a desirable fashion at present.
The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski: A good complement to Why Not Socialism, this is all about whether we, in fact, already have the social technology to implement a desirable form of socialism. Good food for thought, but I’m skeptical we can do any better (at present) than robust welfare state capitalism.
Digital Renaissance by Joel Waldfogel: A nice companion to Fully Grown, in that it contains an argument that the nature of cultural production may have changed, but probably for the better on the whole.
Big Business by Tyler Cowen: The case that worries about market power in the USA are overblown. I didn’t think it grappled nearly enough with counterfactuals.

2019

Narratives

Middlemarch by George Eliot: A whole world of psychologically realized people (and features the ultimate nightmare of an academic; wasting your life on a project that ends up wrong and unpublished).
The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich: The human experience of World War II, from the perspective of Soviet women, who served throughout the ranks. It’s real war, which means it’s sad, not fun.
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: The second time I’ve read the story of Lily Bart’s long and sad decline. Will read again.
Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Much like the Buddhists described in my #1 non-fiction, Knausgaard has shed the assumptions that color and organize our perception of the world, so that he renders mundane life new and vivid.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Incredible characters; St. John could be someone straight out of my #2. The audiobook is read incredibly well by Thandie Newton.
The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkein: Sad and hypnotic work with powerful and iconic passages.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: A book that jolted me out of my routine (also features one of my favorite genres – arctic journey!).
Silas Marner by George Eliot: What if a Hallmark movie was written by one of the greatest writers in the English language?
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: A lovely modern fairy tale.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: Sherlock Holmes and Watson reimagined as monks just before the renaissance.
A Confederacy of Dunces: A portrait of the kind of guy who today would haunt reddit and be a big fan of Mencius Moldbug.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler: Excellent. Uses the sci-fi time travel premise to unpack the psychology of American slavery in a way that would be very difficult to achieve otherwise.
The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin: A mix of amazing sci-fi and cringingly bad stuff, but ultimately you’ll remember the high points more than the low.
The Last Viking by Stephen R. Bown: An excellent companion to “The Worst Journey in the World,” (which I read last year) as it shows what might have been and makes the mistakes of the Scott expedition clear.
Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore: I was not loving this book until it opened up after the first third and kept getting wilder and wilder.
The Murderbot Diaries (#1-#4) by Martha Wells: Actually 4 novellas, but they tell the fun thriller-ey story of murderbot’s self-actualization.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: Kind of cosmic horror that’s afraid of biology instead of physics.
Daytripper by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon: The images do a good job of evoking day-to-day life.
Under Red Skies by Karoline Kan: Interesting memoir of a country undergoing enormous change (China) – how representative are these views though? Who knows?
Blacksad (#1-#3) by Juan Diaz Canales: Zootopia for adults.
The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan: I don’t believe the main theme about the baleful power of the internet, but it’s great to look at.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith: Not bad, but not for me.
Fall, or Dodge in Hell: Amazing first 200 pages, but I was pretty unhappy with it after that.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss: Would have quit if this wasn’t a book we were reading for book club.

Conceptual Non-Fiction

Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright: A wonderful marriage of modern cognitive science and (non-supernatural) Buddhism. Nearly convinced me to go Buddhist!
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse: Evolution provides a wonderful organizing schema for thinking about the origin of “bad” emotions, mental disorders, and more.
A Culture of Growth by Joel Mokyr: I hope to write a lot more about this book someday, but in short, I think it’s the most right theory of why the Industrial Revolution happened when and where it did.
The Years That Matter Most by Paul Tough: An expansive portrait of how American higher education is and is not a good engine of social mobility that argues we can do better, even if there is no silver bullet
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan: A great companion to my #1 and #2 choices that is every bit as good as people say
Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch: We’re getting better at communicating and interacting with each other over this new internet thing
Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Wienersmith: Somehow this year I ended up reading 3 Bryan Caplan books – he has a knack for finding thought-provoking positions on important issues. Efficiently delivered in a compelling and creative way, this one’s my favorite.
The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan: The trouble with Democracy is the voters are people, and people are the worst.
Building the Intentional University by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Ben Nelson, and Bob Kerrey: A top-to-bottom rethinking of higher education based on evidence (such as it is).
The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan: High school and college are not nearly as efficient at building human capital as we think they are.
Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen: An optimistic take on how the internet can be used to rethink the infrastructure of scientific enterprise.
The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa: An interesting complement to my #1, from the perspective of someone whose done it – but my feelings are complicated after it emerged Culadasa was cheating on his wife without her consent.
Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark: A nice overview of contemporary physics, a physics career, and Tegmark’s ideas about why there is something rather than nothing.
Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder: In the absence of new data, foundational theoretical physics has gravitated towards aesthetically based criteria for evaluating theories. This may not be the best strategy for finding truth if reality feels no need to be pretty.
Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda: A set of great first person case studies on how innovation happens in the context of Apple, with thoughtful analysis.
The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti: A classic popular summary of the new urban economics literature which emphasizes the importance of agglomeration effects.
The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper: A great example of fruitful interdisciplinary work – Rome’s decline was hastened by climatic changes and disease outbreaks.
The Box by Marc Levinson: The history of the shipping container illustrates tons of cool ideas about the economics of innovation. Should be right up my alley, but I found it a bit dry at times.
Jump-Starting America by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson: Good overview of important research on economics of innovation, and naturally I like that one of the places they think could be a new research hub is the Des Moines-Ames corridor.
Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown: A good summary of the literature on learning, though I worry a lot of the lit won’t survive the replication crisis.
The Rise of Universities by Charles Homer Hoskins: A very short history about… the rise of universities (in the middle ages).
Life Finds a Way by Andreas Wagner: What can evolution teach us about innovation and creativity in general. Wagner is really good on evolution, but a lot of the other stuff was a bit surface level.
Greek and Roman Education by R. Barrow: The deep roots of formal education in Europe.
TED Talks by Chris J. Andrews: My takeaways – be comfortable, use throughlines, and only your speech from memory if you can do it really, really, well.
More from Less by Andrew McAfee: The central idea that US consumption of natural resources is falling, is actually a pretty small part of the book and I already kind of knew the rest.

A bit of both

Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar: What happens if you take seriously the notion that if you can save a life without losing your own, you have a duty to do that? One of my favorite books of the decade.

2018

Narratives

Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard: A left turn in the seasons quartet that completely recontextualizes Autumn and Winter.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin: A masterpiece of worldbuilding, exploring how an anarchist society would work.
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard: Who knew Earth could be so inhospitable to its children?
Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard: See the world new again.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: The impossibility of shrugging off society’s constraints and retaining its gifts (a reread).
Educated by Tara Westover: A stew of ideas – gaslighting, abuse, cultural immigration, the limits of familial reconciliation, and the founding of religions.
Pet Sematary by Steven King: A heatseeking missile to the heart of this new parent.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison: Exploring grief and prejudice in a geologically active fantasy world.
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou: Riveting account of Theranos’ rise and fall.
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford: The pre-revolutionary war New York is a wonderful setting.
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks: Explores similar terrain as the Dispossessed.
White Darkness by David Grann: The strange siren call of the Antarctic.
The Everything Store by Brad Stone: Solid story of the rise of Amazon.
Louis Riel by Chester Brown: Nuanced story of a complicated revolutionary.

Conceptual Non-Fiction

The Second World Wars by Victor David Hansen: Wonderfully organized opus on World War II as a contest of national productive and organizational capacity.
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie: Correlation can imply causation, (when you combine data with models).
The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: Reason as a social influence tool that, as a bonus, helps you figure out how the world works.
Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David Galenson: Aesthetic innovation comes from either evolutionary processes (tinker and evaluate) or reason (plan and execute).
The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark: Social status is really sticky across generations.
The Measure of Reality by Alfred W. Crosby: Between 1250 and 1600 in Europe, numbers and measurement colonized new domains, potentially setting up our current paradigm of continuous technological progress.
On Writing by Stephen King: Moving story of King’s own entry into the writing life, and his intuitive story-first method of writing (he’s an evolutionary creator).
The Great Leveler by Walter Schiedel: Final two sentences sums it up; “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that, with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Dorn: Very useful, but I need to read it again correctly.
Radical Markets by E. Glen Weyl and Eric Posner: A feast of ideas to wrestle with. (related post)
Cognitive Gadgets by Cecilia Heyes: Pushing cultural evolution even farther; the ways we think and learn are themselves cultural products.
Surfaces and Essences by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander: I wasn’t a fan of the presentation, but it’s an impressive feast of ideas to wrestle with. (short review)
The Allure of Battle by Cathal J. Nolan: Using the history of (mostly) Western war to argue warmakers endlessly underestimate the cost and duration of their wars (a good companion to my #1 pick). (related post)
Capitalism without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake: Goes a long way towards explaining several contemporary economic puzzles.
Misbehavin’ by Richard Thaler: How to shift a paradigm.
The Disruption Dilemma by Joshua Gans: It’s more complicated than Christensen claims.
Free Innovation by Eric Von Hippel: Neat little book on innovation outside the market system (also, it practices what it preaches).
Improbable Destinies by Jonathan B. Losos: Evolution happens faster than you think.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel: Efficiently communicates a lot of original ideas.
The Hungry Brain by Stephan Guyenet: Good overview of the brain and will convince you that dieting is complicated.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: More like “The Lea(r)n Startup.”
Theory and Reality by Peter Godfrey-Smith: Very good overview of the basics of philosophy of science.
True Stories and Other Essay by Francis Spufford: Probably for Spufford fans only (I count myself one).

2017

Narratives

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich – A journey into the depths of human suffering, and occasionally triumph.
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton – How bad can things really get for a woman of privilege in 1800s New York? Bad.
Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard – See the world new again.
My Struggle Book 5 by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Knausgaard’s years as a struggling writer and all around not great guy.
My Struggle Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard – The concerns of a child, treated as weighty and serious as anything in literature.
My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Teenage years for Knausgaard: funny and obsessed with sex.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi – Seven generations is a lot of generations and telling them parallel in America and Ghana makes the challenge twice as hard; staggering accomplishment.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – I didn’t expect such a fully realized world.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – A relatively weak start for me that culminated in a very moving ending.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates – Deserves the praise; Coates’ is a lot more than the caricature you read about in the media.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton – Left me wanting more (so I read the House of Mirth).
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James – Classically styled ghost stories.
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro – Wonderful evocation of regret.
Turn of the Screw by Henry James – Starts as a classic Victorian ghost story but sticks the knife in at the end!
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard – You can just see how great this would work on stage.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel – Enjoyed it, but not sure it will stay with me.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and…
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – Had never read Christie before, and the endings make the books.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge – Really interesting and fun, but at the end, I was like “oh, that’s it?”
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2 by Alan Moore and Kelly O’Neill – I found Hyde and Nemo interesting characters, was generally entertained.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 by Alan Moore and Kelly O’Neill – Not bad, but some of the twists were spoiled by the movie.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: the Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kelly O’Neill – An exercise in worldbuilding without much in the way of story or character.

Conceptual Non-Fiction

The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich – Tentative masterpiece presenting a definitive theory of what makes humans unique among animals.
The Invention of Science by David Wootton – A model of how to study cultural change presenting a novel theory on a topic I find fascinating.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi – Shifted my beliefs. *Caveat: I haven’t read much on this exact topic, and that makes it harder to evaluate non-fiction.
Structure: or Why Things Don’t Fall Down by J.E. Gordon – What a pleasure to discover a whole world of things you didn’t know about.
One Economics, Many Recipes by Dani Rodrik – Simultaneously a brilliant framework for thinking about economic development, a counter-argument to monocausal economic theories, and remarkably prescient about the globalization backlash we’re living in.
(NOTE: at this point I got tired of writing the massive subtitles to all these books)
The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy by Chris Miller – Fantastic short primer on why the USSR collapsed.
The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum – First half is a cool argument that there are basically “bubbles” (in the financial market sense) in evolution; the second half turns its eyes on human evolution and takes it to 11.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon – Useful for me, but probably more detail than most would want.
How Building Learn by Stewart Brand – Idiosyncratic book that’s basically about how ‘top-down’ planning by architects can’t compete with ‘bottom-up’ design by tenants.
The Almost, Nearly, Perfect People by Michael Booth – I found this utterly charming and learned I’m a scandinavia-phile.
Compassion, by the Pound by F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk – Great primer on the economics of farm animal welfare, and good-enough primer on the philosophy of same.
From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett – I feel like Dennett books never deliver on what they promise and sometimes get bogged down in academic squabbles, but are nonetheless stuffed with a lot of interesting ideas.
The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen – The story of the industrial revolution with an emphasis on the inventions and technology; a much needed corrective, but makes it feel more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole.
Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka and Kira Obolensky – Scratched an itch I didn’t know I had.
The Refusal of Work by David Frayne – I love that this book asks why we, as a society, have decided to work so much… but I felt like it missed a lot of opportunities in answering that question.
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker – More of a grab bag than an argument, but I continue to really like Steven Pinker.
The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse – Sasse and I have some similar concerns, but we approach them from different angles.
Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky – A tour de force undermined by a complete refusal to grapple with the replication crisis sweeping through the studies that comprise the book.
Talking Picture by Ann Hornaday – I liked the framing of how to think about what makes a movie “good”, but after the chapter on screenplays I found it increasingly less useful.
White Working Class by Joan C. Williams – This is the second book I’ve read about class issues among white Americans, and in both cases I find the description of classes resonant, but the analysis disappointing.
Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz – Interesting, but I think this work needs more development/vetting.
Scale by Geoffrey West – Maybe 50 pages of very cool stuff… embedded in a much longer book.
The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson – More an argument that the arts would be better off if they drew on biology… written by an eminent biologist…
American Philosophy by John Kagge – Didn’t really work for me; I think I’m just not that interested in this school of philosophy.
Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken – I really liked this when I read it, but one of the reasons was because it seemed like Franken was being forthright and honest (rare in a politician’s memoir)… that belief has been undermined by subsequent events.