Dave's Book List: 2018

Another end of the year book list . . . yuck . . . so let me boil it down to something practical. First some boilerplate: I read a bunch of good books this year, and I'm proud of that (or fairly proud . . . Stacey delivered a healthy whack to my self-esteem) but I understand that you're probably not going to enjoy the same books as me. Certainly not forty-three of the same books.

It's really hard to recommend a good book. Reading-- real reading-- is deeply personal. In the end, it's what you think about the words that makes the book good for you or not. Not that I subscribe to relative aesthetic ethics . . . I think some sentences are written far better than others. But once a book reaches a certain level of competence, then it's really up to the reader to appreciate and make sense of it. And if it sounds like "hillbilly gibberish," as Darryl McDaniels categorized the lyrics to "Walk This Way"-- then even if you sing it like you mean it, it still might not mean much to you at all (even if everyone else loves it).

So skip the list if you want, but grant me one sincere, universal, sure-fire recommendation. A list of one. I would trade all the books on my list for #39. Boom. Literally.

I'm talking about Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Anderson is so passionate about his subject matter that it doesn't matter if you're a Thunder/Flaming Lips fan, or a tornado junkie, or a history buff who wants to know more about the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889-- which Anderson says should either be called "Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town" or "Reckoning of the Doom Settlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie-- none of that matters, as the book races along at EF5 speed towards the inevitable explosion.

Read it.

1. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik


2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe


3. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander


4. White Tears by Hari Kunzru


5. The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield


6. The Night Market by Jonathan Moore


7. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth


8. The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann


9. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson


10. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt


11. Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy by Noam Chomsky


12. Beartown by Fredrik Backman


13. Requiem for the American Dream by Noam Chomsky


14. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin


15. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson


16. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli


17. Drown by Junot Diaz


18. The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga


19. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt


20.  The Changeling by Joy Williams


21. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom


22. Florida by Laura Groff


23. Ask the Dust by John Fante


24. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie


25. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy


26. The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler


27.  Calypso by David Sedaris


28. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer


29. The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum


30. Borne by Jeff Vandermeer


31. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky


32. A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron


33. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer


34. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher


35. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt


36. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher


37. Vox by Christina Dalcher


38. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh


39. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson


40. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data Andrew Wheeler


41. American Prison by Shane Bauer


42. Middlemarch by George Eliot


43. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven JohnsonFarsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson

There's No Shooting This Elephant (Without Giving Yourself a Lobotomy)

If you read Simler and Hanson's book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, you're going to have to get introspective (because you can't go around calling out other people's hidden signalling . . . you don't know exactly what they are thinking and you'll be labeled an asshole . . . except for this one instance with Rick Santorum, where he is so obviously and stupidly signalling to his base that he should have avoided the idea entirely and just chanted "Guns!Guns! Guns!") and you're going to have to recognize-- as Marvin Minsky pointed out in his classic Society of the Mind-- that your brain is a committee and you don't know what all the different sub-groups are plotting and planning (nor do you want to) and whether you are dividing your head into Freud's "id, ego, and superego" or Michael Kendrick's "Night Watchman, Compulsive Hypochondriac, Team Player, Go-getter, Swinging Single, Good Spouse and Nurturing Parent" or the five emotions in Inside Out, you are simplifying and slicing up a complex system of various higher and lower level modules and so it's very hard to decode what's going on because of the interplay between consciously chosen words and actions, unconscious body language, and reactions to social cues . . . Joe Navarro, FBI interrogator, says that "presidents often go to Camp David to accomplish  in polo shirts what they can't seem to accomplish in business suits forty miles away in the White House . . . by revealing themselves ventrally (with the removal of coats) they are saying:

I am open to you;

one of my favorite ways that we think we're immune to "persuasive mass media" and it's rather cheesy "hidden" signalling is the "third person effect": while we believe the media doesn't influence us, we do believe it influences other people . . . and this is how lifestyle advertising works . . . I'm never going to buy Corona beer for myself-- it's well-marketed cheap swill-- but if I'm going to a certain kind of summertime backyard bbq, I might bring Corona and some limes because I know those silly other people associate Corona  and limes with the image of that kind of party and I want to make them happy;

it seems we spend to much on medical care as well, especially in end of life scenarios and situations where people are very sick and their time can only be extended slightly . . . but again, the signalling is important, not the quality of care (we still can't get the majority of doctors to wash their hands) and that's the signal we want to give . . . if you are in dire straits, people, family friends, the government, your job, etcetera will take care of you;

the end of the book concentrates on politics, and this is where you'll be the most frustrated and need to be the most introspective; people tend to signal that they belong to a certain political group-- and this makes sense from a community and friendship and family and religious point of view-- it's much easier to adopt the same politics as the people around you . . . if you live in a small conservative religious town then you're going to get married young, not use birth control, look to your husband as the breadwinner, and not seek abortions . . .  not necessarily because you believe strongly in this suite of behaviors, but if you were to break the norms-- use birth control, stay focused on your career, avoid marriage and pregnancy, then you're an outlier and a cheater and a bad example to the others . . . the converse is true if you grow up in a liberal urban area, but either way, you're going to associate yourself with a bunch of other policies that you may or may not feel strongly about (environmental regulations, gun control, transgender rights, racism, welfare, disability, slavery, tariffs, public land etc.) and that's how political coalitions work-- you tend to choose a side and then work backwards and adopt the policies of that side and rationalize your allegiance to them, which makes sense from a signalling and social sense, but is a total logical mess, despite the fact that these norms have shifted some over time . . . and it's quite scary when people are asked some basic questions about what is happening policy wise in our country . . . but this does make perfect sense: why waste your time learning all these facts and figures when all you really want to do is signal to your tribe that you are on the same team( and I'm going to do an obvious humblebrag here . . . I wrote this while running a fever-- I just tested positive for strain B of the flu).

Bring Back the Boom Box!

I am making my way through Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life . . . the thesis is that not only is our rational mind a "slave to the passions" but that it is beneficial to not recognize this . . . we have a purposeful evolutionary blind spot in our brain that makes us not only hide our true motivations from others but also hide them from ourselves; Simler and Hanson claim that at the root of many of our seemingly altruistic and pure motives are much more self-serving ends, often to show our fitness to the opposite sex and society at large . . . you gave to charity to help the children, of course, but also to show that you have excess funds and are willing to use them to help the community at large . . . but admitting the latter is in poor taste; while you know that a consistent bedtime is great for your children's health, it also really nice to get the little buggers out of you and your wife's hair at the end of the day; you enjoy playing an instrument and don't mind the tedious practicing, but your skill and confidence is also signalling that you have extra time and energy and cognitive ability and manual dexterity to pursue something aesthetic in your spare time; you recently decided that gun control is a good thing and attended the march in Washington, but you also want to signal to your team just how much you despise Trump and the Republicans . . . the book is a light read (with no solutions to this hole in our cognition) but it will get you thinking about what people are possibly signalling with their actions; here are two things that came to my mind:

1) I've been really broken up about the loss of our dog-- I've been listless and cranky and out of sort since we put him down-- and we had off on Thursday for a "slush day" and I went for a run in the snow in Donaldson Park and this made me sad, because Sirius would always accompany me around the park when it snowed . . . and I recognized that part of this sadness was missing the companionship of my trusty pet and part of it is missing the signalling; when you walk or run or bike with a well-trained athletic dog, you are showing the world that you like animals, that you have a purpose, that you have spent much quality time with this happy creature-- and Sirius was especially well-behaved and friendly . . . in a very real sense, he would attract people (sometimes even good looking people of the opposite sex) because a friendly well-trained dog signals something very particular to the world that we often don't think about, especially if there's a routine about it . . . so I miss that signalling as much as I miss my dog, the hefty responsibility of having a dog is actually part of the attraction: you are saying, on top of my wife and kids and job and all that, I can also take care of an animal and train it properly and exercise with it and take it on adventures . . . and now if I take a walk in the park, I'm just a lonely middle-aged man out for a stroll;

2) I've had a number of people tell me they've essentially stopped listening to music-- they've moved to podcasts and audiobooks-- and I'm wondering if this is a result of cell-phones and headphones and air-conditioning and the ubiquity and accessibility of all content; there's much less communal listening because of digital technology; everybody has everything right inside their phone so you don't need to hang out with your friend who bought the newest CD and sit and listen with them . . . when you are listening communally, music is a real signal-- whether it be on a boom box or a car with all the windows open-- then you need to blast stuff for your tribe: hip hop or alternative or jazz or whatever-- and if people of your tribe are listening, then the signals can get really precise: alt-country is very different than hot country, the type of hip-hop indicates whether you are a wannabe gangsta or a cerebral proponent of multiculturalism  but there's much less of this now, people are ensconced in their own private sonic worlds, so they can listen to whatever music they want and no one will know but they can still signal to the outside world with their audio consumption, it's just more about the residue . . . I certainly like to listen to podcasts, but I also like the after-effect: I know some new stuff that might contribute to the next conversation I participate in . . . and an audiobook is similar, not as much fun to listen to in the moment, but the aftereffect is significant, you've read a book and can discuss this and review it and show off your cognitive ability and your allegiance to particular ideas and people . . . music is a much more powerful signal in the moment, when there's a number of people listening and I think it's sad that we've moved away from this, so the only solution is to buy some giant C batteries and bring back the boom box.