2017 Book List

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.

288 Page Test (Match)

If you're a straight American male and you're going to tackle Aravind Adiga's new novel, Selection Day, you'll have to take a page out of Russell Ziskey's playbook from Stripes . . . the army recruiter asks him and his buddy John Winger if they're homosexuals and Ziskey famously replies: "No, but we are willing to learn"-- while you won't be completely in the dark, as the novel has themes that parallel the U.S. sporting world: the obsessiveness, the statistics, the extreme dedication, the overbearing father, the monetizing of something that should be fun, the byzantine system in which to discover and exploit talent, the depths of corruption and the heights of achievement-- you're going to experience all this through the lens of Indian cricket, an obscure sport with opaque rules; this makes many sporting scenes a challenge to envision (there are some cricket terms in the back, but they don't help much) and the book also explores India, mainly Mumbai, outside of cricket, and this is a  foreign world for the two protagonists, brothers who have been groomed to be professional cricketers since their father's sperm met egg . . . things become even more challenging when Manju, the younger and more talented brother, has homosexual urges: this means one thing in blue state liberal modern America, and something completely different in modern India-- homosexuality is more complex, more taboo, and a more difficult path for a young person, especially a young person of cricketing prominence, to navigate . . . so I recommend this novel if you're "willing to learn," and I guarantee you'll learn a great deal (though I still don't understand the ins and outs of a cricket match, though I often watch folks play it in the parks near my home).

When Push Comes To Shove

The ostensible setting of Aravind Adiga's new novel Last Man in Tower is Mumbai, but the real setting is the ensemble cast of characters that live in Vishram Society's Tower A . . . and against this back-drop of people contemplating the most awkward and practical of subjects -- money and class in a country where both are on display constantly-- building developer Dharmen Shah squares off against retired physics teacher Yogesh "Masterji" Murthy . . . Shah has offered the residents of the building cooperative a generous buy-out so that he can knock their crumbling building down and build an elite apartment complex, and nearly everyone is happy to accept the windfall, but Murthy does not want to desert his home and the place where all his memories reside, and once he is pushed, he proves to be an immoveable object; the book is reminiscent of Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, but Adiga builds his pedestrian and generally comic conflict over real estate and money to tragically dramatic proportions-- he makes his social commentary into a page turner . . . the Indian Tom Wolfe . . . 20.2 million hammers out of a possible 20.4 million.

Mumbai Multitasking

It's official: the Giants are so good they're boring; I yearn for the days of Butch Woolfolk (that was exciting football, in 1983 Woolfolk set the record for rushing attempts in a game-- 43), but I am getting a lot of reading done during the games . . . yesterday I finished Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger-- a first person tale of corruption, entrepeneurship, amorality and perserverance in the jungle of the modern Indian dream: and I give it nine rickshaws out of ten.