Every so often, something you read fires off a constellation of neurons that results in an intense moment of clarity. Or maybe it’s not clarity that you feel, but you better understand your confusion. You’re left with a more informed question to ponder. The author has turned a phrase or connected a dot you hadn’t considered. Or maybe you’re the dot connector, relating a point to something you’d heard about on a podcast or learned in school or just experienced in your own life.
These flashes happen when I’m immersed in fiction, ploughing through a memoir, or diving into a book about AI. They come when I’m reading science fiction, classic literature, some book about history or social science or just about anything you can imagine.
In every case, these are moments of pure, unadulterated joy.
We need more joy.
In a world where millions of experts live in our pocket, I’d posit that these eureka moments can make a material difference in how we move forward with intention and compassion. The best entrepreneurs and academics and politicians and business leaders and scientists will not distinguish themselves because of the facts they’ve socked away as much as they will follow these flashes, trust their intuition, and become intensely, relentlessly curious.
And people who strive to live a life of virtue, who want to get better and explore the human condition, will likewise do so through this sense making.
Sure, you can have such moments watching a YouTube video or scrolling social media posts, but, for my money, books deliver more depth and more clarity more frequently.
They came pretty often this past year. I’m grateful for the joy. I’m grateful for so many amazing books. Books that shared thoughtful perspectives about the human condition. Books that offered that flash of insight and that profound question. Books that drew out a character in meaningful ways.
It’s always tough to narrow down the list of favorites, but here’s this year’s attempt:
“It takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second.”
Sapolsky, a primatologist and neurobiologist, has spent a lifetime studying why we behave the way we do, exploring what activates certain parts of the brain, how short-term contextual factors influence action, what role parenting and culture play, and looking at how we’ve evolved as a species, both at an individual and civilizational level. His conclusion? It’s complicated. All of these factors work together to bring about an action– buying that pickup or switching to that almond milk or filling out a certain square on a ballot can’t solely be attributed to some Oedipal complex or the identification of a particular gene or the cultural context in which we live. Your decision to share that meme on Facebook, give the finger to someone in traffic, or volunteer at the Foodbank was influenced by your parents’ values and whether you grew up in an individualistic or collectivist culture, which might have been shaped by whether your ancestors grew rice or wheat. Then again, you might have just been hungry or had a stressful meeting that morning. Your genes had something to say about it, but so did the opinions of people in your circle. And whether you grew up in New Jersey or Indiana or New Delhi or Indonesia. This book helped me better understand our crazy political climate and the us/ them divisions that the worst of opportunists have seized upon. Not an easy read, but one that I have gone back to mentally more and more often.
“I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.”
I first encountered Percival Everett as a professor in my 1991 creative writing class. He was so cool. At the time, he’d just released a book of short stories and had published a few novels. Suder had been his master’s thesis at Brown, and I wondered why more people didn’t read his stuff. Almost every year, he’d publish another novel and almost every year, he wouldn’t hit short lists for win notable prizes, and he certainly wasn’t showing up on bestseller lists. That’s changed. After American Fiction came out (a movie based on his novel Erasure), everyone seemed to be talking about Everett. James, like so much of Everett’s work, takes on complicated themes. He manages to be playful and smart, while introducing challenging subjects, often exposing us to deep-seated hypocrisy and inexplicable hate. This novel proves less experimental than some, but operates on multiple levels. It’s an ode to Twain’s Huck Finn, the great American novel, but stakes out its own territory. Everett gives voice to Jim a century and a half after he and Huck floated down that raft. So powerful and, sadly, still so resonant.
Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life– William Finnegan
“But the ecstasy of actually riding big waves requires placing yourself right beside the terror of being buried by them: the filament separating the two states becomes diaphanous. Dumb luck weighs heavily, painfully. And when things go badly, as they inevitably do– when you’re caught inside by a very large wave, or fail to make one– all your skill and strength and judgment mean nothing. Nobody maintains their dignity while getting rumbled by a big wave. The only thing you can hope to control at that point is the panic.”
Finnegan grew up surfing in Hawaii and California, and then spent his life chasing the Big Wave. I’ve never surfed a day in my life, yet I found Finnegan’s descriptions riveting. The best memoirs dive us deep into an unfamiliar topic, but they also serve as metaphors that help us make sense of the world.
A life well lived is not an easy life. It’s not a life without failure and misfortune. Giant waves crash down on us. It’s a life lived on the razor’s edge between fear and excitement. You want to be nowhere else and anywhere else at the same time. We’d all do well to be surfers, hyperalert, and catching waves, recognizing that sometimes our skill and focus and effort will pay off and sometimes they won’t. Still, we should never stop hunting the Big Waves. That’s where we’ll find joy and meaning and fulfillment.
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”
I spent a good portion of the year wrestling with big questions about technology, the metacrisis, and how we reconcile our exponential growth expectations with finite planetary resources. How do we shift our short-term profit focus and prioritize long term flourishing? I dove into the work of some accomplished philosophers and technologists and business leaders. Leave it to Powers to punctuate those efforts with a brilliant, page-turning narrative that left me wondering how we might get the genie back in the bottle. He’s my favorite writer when it comes to intersecting science with narrative (going back to Galatea 2.2). His last three novels ask bigger and bigger questions, and challenge me in new and different ways. It’s so hard to follow up The Overstory and Bewilderment, but Powers has done it. I look at the ocean differently after reading this novel. Could there be higher praise?
Chain Gang All-Stars– Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Remember that just because something is, doesn’t mean it can’t change, and just because you haven’t seen something before, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
Adjei-Brenyah takes an unflinching look at what’s wrong with our celebrity-crazed, violence-obsessed world. He writes an inventive satire that also happens to be a compelling story. He’s a world-builder like few I’ve ever come across. But Adjei-Brenyah’s real magic comes from his ability to inject so much humanity into his characters. He made me question my love of sport, made me angry about the perverse incentives in the for-profit prison industry, and made me worried that I was having too much fun reading about this disturbing world that bares more than a passing resemblance to our own.
The Anxious Generation– Jonathan Haidt
“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents.”
There are books that mark societal shifts. Silent Spring kicked off the environmental movement. On the Road signaled the beginning of the Beat Generation. Moneyball changed the way we talked about data and statistics. The Anxious Generation promises to be the clarion call we need to re-think our relationship with phones, particularly for our kids. Haidt lays out a clear and cogent argument for age-gating phones, getting them out of schools, and recognizing the harmful externalities. I only hope he can inspire enough of a groundswell to bring about change in a world where the largest, most profitable companies fund politicians to prevent anything from getting in their profit-making way.
“Until we understand how we reached this place, America will remain a country where getting addicted is far easier than securing treatment.”
It’s almost unfathomable that we’ve allowed opioids to infiltrate so much of our society. How could this have happened? For sure, it’s the result of broken systems with perverse incentives. But to ignore the bad actors is to ignore the real underlying problem. Beth Macy exposes both the systemic issues and those bad actors. She also brings a level of humanity to the crisis, exposing readers to people struggling with addiction and the challenges with treatment. Our War on Drugs has been a fifty-year failure. Macy helps understand why and gives us a sense of the real cost.
Why Nations Fail- Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
“Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.”
We hear a lot about the end of democracy. We’re told that these are revolutionary times. Empires fall. We’re primed for a new world order. But there are conditions that bring about the end of a nation. And why do some nations never really get started? Why do they face constant turmoil and little prosperity? Acemoglu and Robinson look at economic and political institutions, recognizing that those that are extractive do not last. And the political conditions that result in an extractive economic system often don’t change with revolution. This is a cautionary tale for a world struggling with inequality and a map for nations to thrive. It’s a story of economic inclusion and the nurturing of creative destruction, two things that don’t always go hand-in-hand.
The Warmth of Other Suns- Isabel Wilkerson
“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.”
We’re in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Upskilling/ reskilling might be the most important investment individuals, companies, and societies can make. The good news: We’ve been through this before. Half the country worked on farms when the Second Industrial Revolution kicked off. I read this book looking to understand that shift, particularly how and why people migrated, with the assumption that it had much to do with economic opportunity. Wilkerson let me know that it was about so much more. She offers a window into the Jim Crowe south and puts on a masterclass in journalism, sharing the stories of three people who migrated to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. We get to know their hopes and dreams, and we emerge with a different level of empathy and a deeper understanding of the forces at play. It’s impossible to separate the economic opportunity from the freedom people need in order to flourish. Deeply researched and beautifully written.
Tell Me Everything– Elizabeth Strout
“These are broken people. Big difference between being a broken person and being evil. In case you don’t know. And if you don’t think everyone is broken in some way, you’re wrong. I’m telling you this because you have been so fortunate in your life, you probably don’t even know such broken people exist.”
No one does ensemble novels like Strout. Her characters live quiet lives while struggling with big questions. They want to be seen and loved; they want to see others and they want desperately to love. This is the fourth Strout novel I’ve read, and it’s a bit of a reunion, several past protagonists coming together. There’s a thin murder mystery and will-they, won’t-they love story, but the real magic happens in the interactions between characters. We get to eavesdrop on small-town Maine, and we get to hear Strout’s wisdom that, in another’s pen might come off as trite or didactic. With her, it never does. Olive Kittredge and Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess inhabit the pages, but they also have come to inhabit part of my world. Quite a feat.
“His soul sat up. It met me. Those kinds of souls always do – the best ones. The ones who rise up and say “I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places.”
Ok. I finished this book yesterday, so there could be a recency bias here, but I think it will stand the test of time (especially considering it’s almost twenty years old!). It won awards as a YA book. I admittedly don’t read a lot of YA, but this doesn’t seem to fit the genre, other than having a young protagonist. It’s a haunting tale about a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany during World War II. Zusak makes a bold decision to have Death narrate the story. It works. I fell in love with Liesel and her father and the man who hid in their basement. I loved the way Zusak intersected life and death and the role words played in Hitler’s rise and the role they played in Liesel’s salvation. It chronicles one of the ugliest and most horrific periods in our modern history and manages to offer beautiful rays of light.
Other Books Worth Checking Out:
- The Pursuit of Happiness– Jeffrey Rosen: For a few hundred years, the pursuit of happiness meant the pursuit of virtue. And then, in the 60s, the baby boomers decided that happiness was more about feeling good than being good. Rosen explores the founders’ intent and makes me want everyone to pursue the happiness they considered.
- AI Snake Oil– Arvind Narayaran and Sayash Kapoor: A critical exploration of the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence, unraveling the myths surrounding its capabilities. This balances out so much of the hype that’s out there.
- Co-Intelligence— Ethan Mollick: Mollick has been a sane and helpful voice amidst all of the AI noise. Co-Intelligence is a great read for anyone trying to understand how we can and should leverage what’s here and what’s coming..
- Knife, Meditations after an Attempted Murder— Salman Rushdie: Rushdie is raw and honest and unflinching in telling the story of his near-death experience at Chautaqua Institute a few summers ago. I’ve been to Chautacqua many times, and found the audio book (narrated by Rushdie) to be particularly resonant and chilling.
- Kafka on the Shore— Haruki Murakami: A surreal and dreamlike journey through parallel narratives that explore fate, memory, and the mysteries of the subconscious. Every so often, I just need a good Murakami story!
- The Immortalists— Chloe Benjamin: A family saga that examines the impact of knowing the date of your death on the way you choose to live your life. Sounds like a gimmick, but Benjamin makes it work.
- Tom Lake– Ann Patchett: A poignant meditation on love, memory, and the choices that shape our lives, set against the backdrop of a family farm during the pandemic. Another good audio book choice (narrated by Meryl Streep).
- Rebalancing Society— Henry Mintzberg: What if the end of the Cold War wasn’t the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, but the failure of an out-of-balance state? Mintzberg makes a passionate call to rethink capitalism and democracy, offering a roadmap to create a more equitable and sustainable world.
- How Democracies Die– Steven Levitzky and Daniel Ziblatt: A chilling analysis of how democracies around the globe falter and how to protect them from authoritarianism and an erosion of norms. Particularly important in light of the revolutionary air that populists are breathing. Careful what we wish for.
- The Covenant of Water— Abraham Verghese: An epic and evocative multigenerational story set in Kerala, India, exploring family, love, and the mysteries of inheritance.
- When Crack Was King— Donovan X. Ramsey: Similar to Dopesick, this book details the rise of Crack Cocaine. Ramsey also takes a page out of Wilkerson’s book by telling the story through several characters.
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