2020: A Good Year For Reading Books

I read 54 books in 2020-- the most since I've been keeping this list-- and one of those books was The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a monstrous time that should count as two books-- and while there are a number of good reads on the list, if I had to pick three favorites, they would be:

Best Literary Fiction:  Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Best Non-fiction: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

Best Sci-fi: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

and the best detective series would be the first three Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley

here's the complete list, happy reading . . .

1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

2) The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch

3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley

9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty

12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh

14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt

18) Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon 

19) Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo

20) Harrington on Hold'em Vol I by Dan Harrington

21) The Bat by Jo Nesbø

22) Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, Matt Flynn

23) Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky

24) Harrington on Hold'em Vol II by Dan Harrington

25) To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

26) Waiting for Straighters by Tommy Angelo

27) American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

28) Townie by Andre Dubus III

29) Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen

30) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

31) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

32) Do Not Resuscitate by Nicholas Ponticello 

33) The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

34) The Cipher by Kathe Koja

35) Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely

36) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

37) "H" is For Homicide by Sue Grafton

38) The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

39) Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little

40) Soccer Systems and Strategies by Jens Bangsbo and Birger Peitersen

41) The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide edited by Michael Craig

42) Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

43) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

44) Tightrope: Americans Reaching For Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

45) The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

46) The Peripheral by William Gibson

47) Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson

48) The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

49) A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

50) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

51) Deacon King Kong by James McBride

52) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

53) Agency by William Gibson

54) The Fifth Season by J.K. Jemisin  

Does Dave Possess Agency?

Agency is book two of William Gibson's "Jackpot" trilogy and while it's not as difficult a read as the first (The Peripheral) it is still unnerving because nobody is where or when they seem; the jackpot is only a prize for those who survived this ironically named ecopolitical apocalypse in the near future-- those who made it to the other side of the pandemics and massive climate change and political fallout enjoy a world recovering: low population, greater technology, and some methods of reversing the damage humanity has done; there is also massive quantum computing and through this "server" those rich and powerful enough can send information backward and forward through time-- so it's a time travel story, but even more complicated than Primer . . . no one is where and when they seem-- powerful folks in the future start new "stubs" when they contact and meddle with the past, which they do in drones, with AI, and in various networks-- the perspectives shift rapidly-- you could be in 2136, occupying a drone in 2017-- you could be in 2017, embodying a peripheral in 2136-- and you could be relaying information back and forth, changing timelines in the past and future as you relay information and technology . . . you might be a government agency doing this, a rogue agency, you might be a corrupt plutocrat from "the klept," or even disembodied AI with agency . . . I've read the entire William Gibson ouvre and I trust him implicitly as an author, that's why I hung in with these two books-- and while there aren't giant epiphanic revelations at the end, you get the hang of the way things work (in the same time frame as the characters, often) and I'm interested in how he finishes this subtle exploration of free will and determinism turned on its head.

Both Ends of the Sci-Fi Continuum Distract Dave

In order to distract myself from all this election nonsense, I've been listening to Tom Petty and reading science-fiction; I just finished one of the most difficult sci-fi books I've ever read-- William Gibson's The Peripheral-- usually I'm down with Gibson's prose, but this novel that seems to be about cyber-space and controlling three-dimensional peripheral avatars is actually about quantum information time-travel through a server-- surprise?-- and I was never comfortable with the plot, the characters, or what-the-hell-was-going-on . . . but I made it through and the end finally made some sense (this article with spoilers helped) and then I shifted gears and read one of the funniest, easiest, most entertaining and illuminating books I've read in a long while: Set my Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson-- a screenwriter for Pixar-- who takes a dental bot named Jared on a poignant and cinematic journey through human emotions, culture, and connection . . . it's so much fun that I watched election coverage from 9 PM to 9:20 PM last night and then went and finished the book and fell asleep, only to awaken to more ambiguity, so I'm starting another sci-fi novel: A Memory Called Empire.

A Couple of Books That the Unabomber Would Enjoy

Jonathan Moore's The Night Market is a sci-fi crime thriller that blends the byzantine plotting and tone of Raymond Chandler with some William Gibson/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type near future technology, and there's also plenty of Philip K. Dick-style paranoia (which is fully deserved) but the real impact of this post-noir San Francisco crime drama is that it is all too real-- the city is a burned out husk, as are most of the people who walk through it, because rampant consumption and a sinister form of advertisement has invaded the consciousness of the city and its inhabitants . . . the conspiracy is far-reaching and just and shallow and greedy as it should be . . . this is a book about giving up and giving in: the apocalypse is here and we are living in it-- and the fact that there is not much difference between the San Francisco in the novel and the world right now is beyond frightening . . . I was already primed for this novel because I've been reading Paul Kingsnorth's new collection of essays, Collections of a Recovering Environmentalist, in which he announces the death of the conservation movement and the promulgation of a new form of neo-liberal economic environmentalism, concerned with carbon sinks, global warming, eco-tourism, and market-based technological solutions for ecological problems, which is in contrast to the old school Green movement, which found intrinsic and sacred value in the beauty of biodiversity and wild landscapes, and celebrated the primal human attachment for natural spaces and places free of human subjugation . . . Moore's The Night Market is the end result of this shift towards data-driven market-based solutions, there is complete consumerism, complete consumption, and a world completely dictated by brands, corporations, markets, and the desire to replace the things that are important with things.

To Distribute or Not to Distribute

My two favorite wonky podcasts have recently done episodes on healthcare (The Weeds, Common Sense) and the takeaway is this:

1) Americans pay a ton of money for healthcare and we don't get very good results-- we may be the greatest country in the world for lakes, but we are not even in the ballpark when it comes to health outcomes-- not only do we pay more, but we get less, and-- most significantly-- for a developed country, we die rather young;

2) we have taken the worst aspects of free markets and government subsidized healthcare and combined them, and at every step of the way, players are trying to squeeze profits from the system-- and without the government to negotiate prices, the patient is screwed;

3) Republicans care more about giving a tax break to rich people than actually reforming the system;

4) we may be subsidizing medical innovations for the rest of the world with our high drug costs . . . or that's what people who work in the industry would like you to believe;

and Dave's theory is this:

it all comes down to what William Gibson said: "the future is here-- it's just not evenly distributed," and how America decides to apply this sentiment to the population, as there's plenty of incredible medical advances, knowledge, drugs, and treatments and if we distributed these to the majority of Americans, we'd have a much healthier country . . . or you could take the Paul Ryan route and try to make the distribution as lumpy and uneven as possible, which might save money, or might allow for some advances for certain people, but wouldn't give everyone access to the future that is already here . . . and it seems that the disagreement over Gibson's idea breaks down along party lines; I know I'd rather have everyone getting access to all we have available now, even if that meant there wouldn't be as many innovations in the future, especially if you could decouple health care from employment and allow people to move around the country and switch careers without fear of losing benefits, as that would really spur the economy (as would a healthier populace) and maybe convince a few folks that coal mining is the only way to make a living (despite the particulate matter and mercury poisoning, which are quite costly, from both an environmental and healthcare perspective) but there are plenty of people-- rich people, conservative people, lobbyists, people in the medical business-- that would like to see things continue as they are, or even get less evenly distributed and make the industry more about economics and free markets . . . but the important thing to remember is that good health is a temporary state, no matter how well you feel, the reaper's scythe will cut you down to size soon enough . . . cheers!

Could William Gibson and Donald Trump Both Be Right?

William Gibson, the acclaimed sci-fi author, has often said: "The future is already here-- it's just not very evenly distributed," and not only does this apply to access to technology and first world infrastructure, but it also applies to the benefits of globalization; the Freakonomics podcast has been examining Donald Trump's claim that the American Dream is dead, and it seems that in certain places, Trump is right-- while a few decades ago, 90 percent of thirty year olds earned more than their parents, now that number is down to fifty percent-- and the effects of globalization, which economists initially thought would be a win-win for everyone, are-- in the words of economist David Autor: "slow, frictional, and scarring," and so it's not that the American Dream is dead-- plenty of people are taking advantage of the global economy, plenty of people are richer than ever before, and most people have access to first world technological wonders . . . but the American Dream is unevenly distributed, especially if you're a non-college educated male who is unwilling to work in healthcare, or someone who wasn't given a head start (not that the government isn't trying to help a bit, listen to the new Planet Money podcast Retraining Day to hear how this works) which includes black Americans . . . I just finished a treatise on how to survive in this new-fangled, fast-paced, unpredictable world, called Whiplash-- it's coauthored by Joi Ito, the Director of the MIT Media Lab and Jeff Howe, the Director of the Media Innovation program at Northeastern) and they point out that "between 1934 and 1962 the federal government backed 120 billion dollars in home mortgages" which generated trillions of dollars of equity and 98 percent of these loans went to white families, so by 1984, the median white family had a net worth of 90,000 dollars and the median black family had a net worth of six thousand dollars . . . and the trend has continued, so white or black, if you get left behind, you get "whiplash," meanwhile, even the people with money are having a hard time predicting the future, and the only certainty now is that things will move at a dizzying pace, the internet has connected all the knowledge and minds of the earth, artificial intelligence and genetic modification are going to make wholesale changes to everything we do, and while human beings are adaptable, this trait is going to be pushed to the limit in the near future, and we're going to have to have a "healthy relationship with uncertainty," so the traditional American Dream is certainly dead for some, and it may be too late for them to retrain for the new economy, and the Dream is going to be revised often and fast, like the ascension of Uber . . . so you're going to need to both hang on tight and stay loose, so you don't suffer whiplash in the inevitable crash . . . or you'll find yourself in a rusted out tombstone of a town, voting for Donald Trump and hoping for a past that never existed and will certainly never return.

I Give Up!

Diligent readers of Sentence of Dave know that I believe that Neal Stephenson is one of the greatest writers of our time -- he combines the best qualities of Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson -- and so it is with much regret that I report that I am quitting his gigantic philosophical novel Anathem . . . perhaps this is a case of what Thoreau said: "It is not all books that are as dull as their readers," as I have certainly become more dull of wit in the past year, because my life has become extraordinarily busy, but whatever the reason, I have been stuck in the forty percent zone on my Kindle for weeks (and I even took out the analog version from the library to see if that was the problem) but it looks like I'm never going to finish this incredibly speculative and meta-physical novel, and so I started something more concrete-- The Looming Tower-- and I was able to read forty pages before I fell asleep (a great contrast to Anathem . . . I couldn't get through two pages before nodding off) and Lawrence Wright's book on the origins of Al-Qaeda and 9/11 is well written and full of great research, including this quotation from essayist E.B. White, who was trying to get a grip on the dawn of the nuclear age . . . before we learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: "In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Somewhere Between The Matrix and Inception I Learn How To Communicate With Women

Twelve years ago, my future wife and I went to the movies to see The Matrix, and during the film my future wife expressed her confusion with the plot, and so I whispered a long-winded explanation to her: beginning with Plato's cave, mentioning Tron and Lawnmower Man, citing William Gibson, and finally explaining how this ancient theme of living in a world of created shadows was being used by the Wachowski brothers . . . and I don't think this explanation helped her enjoy the film and, looking back, I'm sure she thought I was an annoying wind-bag, but she still married me, and--get this-- I have IMPROVED myself; last weekend we started watching Inception and because I had the flu, my wife had been minding the boys all day, so she was exhausted, and after about an hour of watching, she started falling asleep and she called the movie "stupid" and "full of itself," and I had been paying very close attention and I could have explained exactly what was happening, but instead of attempting a long-winded explanation,  I AGREED with her, because she was right-- the film is full of itself, and she just wanted some validation of her emotions-- and the next day, while our kids were at the movies with my parents-- she let me explain the plot to her and we sat down and watched the rest of the movie together and had a great discussion about it afterward . . . and so, slowly  but surely, I am learning how to communicate with women.

These Are A Few Of William Gibson's Favorite Things

Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, "The future is already here-- it's just unevenly distributed," and the characters in his new novel zero history definitely live in the positive agglomeration of the futuristic present . . . rhenium darts, penguin shaped floating surveillance drones, and ekranoplans are all de rigueur in this universe; in fact, things, especially fashionable things linked to the military, play a more important role than people in the book, which makes the novel hard to follow . . . the people are bystanders to the fashion, technology, intrigue, and marketing that surrounds them . . . and, appropriately, people in the book are constantly "Googling" things because they are beyond their ken, and they are worried that their knowledge of these secret, obscure, often technological things might be ersatz, and meanwhile, in my less futuristic present, I was Googling things in the book as well, to see if they were real or not: I'm glad I finished the book, I've read everything William Gibson has written and I don't want to stop now, but this is the weakest effort in the "present-future" trilogy (the other two are Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).