I just finished my 46th book of 2017 this afternoon and it's a fitting one for the end of the year; Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials by Malcolm Harris is an intelligent, analytical and provocative book written by a millennial about the millennial generation that might just change your mind about millennials in general . . . from my perspective, this book is about the end of my era, Generation X, and any slackerly influence it might have had upon the world: kids these days are more prone to anxiety, work harder, do less drugs (drug overdoses seem to be following the Baby Boomer cohort), have less sex, do more homework, get surveilled more-- for a scary take on this, watch Episode 2 of season 4 of Black Mirror-- take out giant student loans which fund ever expanding building projects on college campuses, intern more, get paid less, compete more in an organized fashion, train for this organized competition in areas that are supposed to be fun and healthy-- sports, music, the science fair, dance; are trained by their cell phones to be more available and productive than any work force in history, and don't have much of a shot at the wealth in our nation, which has increasingly been hoarded by the old and the 1% . . . Harris backs this up with plenty of data-- beware: there are charts in this book-- but it is slender and if you have kids or teach or coach or work with kids in any capacity, then you should read this book; the conclusion is not very hopeful . . . I worry about my own children and this book is making me take a step back in my expectations for them and for myself as a parent; the book is also making me enjoy my stable and noncompetitive union job, as the millennial generation will experience job precarity as a matter of course; anyway, this ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution, which is to try to live more in the slow, meditative, and profound world of great books, and avoid the twitchiness of the internet as much as possible . . . I did a pretty good job of it in 2017, especially because we cut the cable and I stopped watching football (and playing fantasy football, which is another one of those productivity training devices that "prepares" people for 24/7 availability and efficiency) and while I didn't quite reach my goal of a book a week, I was close . . . anyway, here is the list-- I discussed my seven favorites on Gheorghe: The Blog-- and wrote reviews of all of them here on Sentence of Dave . . . my favorite book of the year is The Power by Naomi Alderman: if you're going to read one book in 2018, that should be the one . . . and you should try to read at least one book a year, just to avoid being part of the American 26% that reads zero books each year; these are just the books I finished, I started plenty of others and bailed, so anything on this list is pretty good:
1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga
2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927
3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty
9) Normal by Warren Ellis
10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior
11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman
12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack
13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon
15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun
17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty
20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan
21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick
26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue
28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie
31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane
32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons
36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road
37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
42) Roddy Doyle's Smile
43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
45) The Power by Naomi Alderman
46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.
2 comments:
I always enjoy this post--the range of stuff you read is remarkable. The Dorito Effect would be a good name for a garage band.
new band name! mr truck and the dorito effect.
i work hard at my eclectic pedantry and i definitely don't have that obsessive gene, one of those people who reads a lot about the same thing-- a civil war buff or something. i like to keep it shallow and annoying.
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