2025 books

goal

target: 30 - read: 14 (so far)

if i were a better man, i’d do something focused and high minded. like targeting research in a specific vein of study. i am not that man.

books

note: this is a running list. (in reverse chronological order)

cross purposes (jonathon rauch)

this is one of those books that i had a very difficult time putting down. rauch is secular, gay and jewish. his dissection of american christianity is, spot. on. he manages to tickle pretty much every question and frustration that i’ve had with the american evangelical and christian movement, dig into some of the essential tensions with christianity in its various flavors in the US and offer up a mea culpa in well under 200 pages. i learned an aboslute shit ton in this book and i was forced to really think hard about some of the limits and/or merits of religion in american life. i’m not convinced to go to church. but i do need to remember to take a beat when i rub up against those who are deeply religious.

one key take away that bears keeping in mind. the founding fathers assumed the presence of a baseline of shared ethics when they founded this country. the basis for this, in their world, was christianity, in that it was what they were swimming in. as the US has become more secular (for reasons that are well summarized in the book) other things have filled the void (notably hyper-partisan politics) and they do not carry the same (or necessarily any) ethical baselines.

there’s an absolutely fascinating discussion of the merits of compromise and the LDS compromises that have been reached over the years. this really forced me to think differently about a few different topics. (how to allow for religious freedoms while still enabling personal liberties.) (5-mar, 2025)

additional notes

recommendation: OMG, yes.

skin in the game (nassim nicholas taleb)

i have really mixed feelings about this book. on the one hand, there are a lot of really useful reminders and discussion about evaluating biases and getting comfortable with one’s situation. on the other hand, the book is a maddeningly tedious read, with taleb’s insistence on overcomplicating the core concepts. in doing so he does the reader little / no favors in terms of coming to grips with the core concepts.

add to this taleb’s apparent inability to suppress pointless digressions where he rails on academics and/or those he deems to be high status, low intellectual horsepower. he goes so far as to invent an acronym for them, IYI, Intellectuals, Yet Idiots. this all comes across as petty and small.

that said, there are some solid reminders in here:

• the slavery of the corporate class and the fact that people who are acclimated to large organizations become less valuable over time and they need to cling to the corporation in order to remain relevant.
• beware of people who have been in large companies for more than a single solid vesting period. they’re not the ones to take growth risks. they’re the ones that stick around because of comfort, or indoctrination. much of what he described in the “how to legally enslave someone” chapters is straight out of HR’s playbook.
• there’s another issue here in that people in modern society cannot operate from a level playing field. this is less well articulated, but there would be a lot for an enterprising IYI to dig into.

there’s a really good discussion in here about the tyranny of the most intransigent in society and what we as a society should actually be intolerant about. which is kind of a paradoxical bit of discussion …

“should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?” this is something that’s coming home to roost and we’re going to be muddling through this for the next couple of decades. if we’re lucky. (23-feb, 2025)

recommendation: ehhh, if you’re up for it.

how should a person be? (sheila heti)

i added this to my queue based on reading the work of art last year. i was left with the impression that this sparked a fair amount of debate and/or there was a fair amount of discussion around the format (somewhere between memoir and fiction) and the depiction of women-women friendships. it lands with a bit of a thud for me. the most thought provoking bit in the book was a fictional editorial by a 14 year old about what culture is. i don’t know if that was being cute, but i found it to be the only bit worth scribbling in the margin for. oh, and this little bit. (13-feb-2024)

the world is made up of poets and retards, and everyone’s a poet, and everyone’s a retard. (p.134)

recommendation: shrug

confessions of a barbarian: selections from the journals of edward abbey, 1951-1989 (roger donald, david petersen)

this dude. i mean, really; this dude. these journals paint a complicated picture of a guy who was not able to settle down, constantly in conflict with his partner and a hodgepodge of perspectives, often at odds with each other. i think this really is abbey at his most honest. i suspect i should be reading more author’s journals if i’m curious as to how they actually are as people. (09-feb-2024)

recommendation: shrug

the needs of strangers (michael ignatieff)

this is a fairly slim book, but it really packs a punch. this is one of the most compelling books on philosophy i’ve read in a while. there’s a lot to unpack here. ignatieff draws on the accounts surrounding david hume’s death. adam smith and rousseau’s debates, and hieronymus bosch’s painting in the (ahem) illustration of his points. it’s compelling without much in the way of philosophical tedium.

ignatieff asserts that our responsibilities toward others extend far beyond just providing material necessities. he argues that human needs exist in multiple dimensions:

1. material needs - food, shelter, healthcare - which modern welfare states (should) attempt to address. these are essential but not sufficient.

2. social or relational needs - the need for recognition, respect, and dignity. this is where ignatieff’s argument becomes more complex than traditional welfare state theory. suggesting that true human welfare requires acknowledging and supporting people’s need for social recognition and dignity.

3. existential or spiritual needs - the need for meaning, understanding, and ways of facing life’s fundamental challenges (like mortality) these needs don’t disappear in a secular society, even if traditional religious frameworks become less universal.

ignatieff argues that our responsibility to others must encompass all these dimensions. a comprehensive conception of social welfare needs to consider how to support human dignity and meaning-making, not just material subsistence. making our obligations to strangers more demanding but also more human - we need to think about how social institutions and practices can support both material and non-material human needs.

good luck with that. still, something to aspire to while we’re getting screwed. (9-feb-2025)

recommendation: highly recommended.

the knowledge: how to rebuild civilization in the aftermath of a cataclysm (lewis dartnell)

this was a bit of a lark. it’s by no means a comprehensive manual for rebooting civilization, but it was an interesting thought experiment and a reminder of some of the key technologies and resources that we have underpinning our civilization today. (31-jan-2025)

recommendation: sure, why not?

maus ii: a survivors tale and here my troubles began (art spiegelmen)

in many respects this was harder to read than the first volume. the depictions of what took place in the camps was brutal. this lacked the lurking tension of being displaced and immersed you into the brutality of the holocaust. (2-feb-2025)

recommendation: highly recommended.

the fire next time (james baldwin)

this was a short read while on the plane. incredible writing. dense without being puzzling or circular. lots to think about and some incredibly spot on commentary on white america. most of which rings just as true today as it likely did when it was written. a great read. should be mandatory reading in schools. that won’t happen in this political climate. (25-Jan-2025)

recommendation: highly recommended.

bit literacy: productivity in the age of information and email overload (mark hurst)

this was written in 2007 and i really should have known better than to add it to the kindle before the trip. the philosophy is solid but this hasn’t aged well technologically. also, it’s pre-iphone. some good reminders. (22-Jan-2025)

• choosing durable file formats
• owning your data and not being totally beholden to the cloud. (which was pretty nascent at the time of writing.)

recommendation: meh

maus i: a survivor’s tale: my father bleeds history (art spiegelmen)

another graphic novel that i found lurking on one of our shelves and lo, i hadn’t read this. definitely worth all of the press that i recall from this in the 1990s. i can’t believe i waited this long to read it. i did a little digging and surveyed the 3 oracles (claude, gemini, and gpt-4) to try to better understand the controversy around this. (i’m poorly suited as a baseline for cultural offense.)

summary: people took issue with the use of animals as imagery and the strong language, as well as the graphic depiction of the holocaust. pretty garden variety lily-livered shit. our society has become oddly delicate.

sidebar: in tennessee (2022) they voted to ban maus from the 8th grade curriculum because of strong language and the nude depiction of a mouse. my reading of the tennessee school board meeting minutes leaves me embarrassed for tennessee.

(11-Jan-2025)

recommendation: highly recommended.

murder in the solid state (will mccarthy)

i picked this up at a local used book store and it’s straight out of the 1990s “hard sci-fi”. the underlying technology of interest is nanotechnology which hasn’t had the oomph that we would have thought it would exert in the 90s. there are amusing futuristic nods in here and hilarious misses.

hits

• a brain scanning device that is the successor to the lie detector to sensitive to be useful and at the same time too good to be admissible in court. seems about right to me.
• cellular video phones and distracted drivers.
• rapacious technologists and their obstruction and preservation of hegemony as it suits them.
• a third political party that has outsized influence, but is all about, “law and order”, and giving the police everything that they want. while the republicans are as bent to the whims of the billionaires and the democrats are as ineffectual as ever.
• chinese industrial spies
• heads up displays a la meta ray bans
• cities violently sweeping up the homeless and ghettoizing them into toxic waste zones.
• home automation with keyword commands. the notion of a 12Hz burglar alarm that would mess up intruders was bowel movingly amusing/interesting.

misses

• a round of cocktails is $10.
• the ham fisted condescension of the scientists in conversation is even insulting to the reader.
• doesn’t imagine the internet per se. reflects a classic telco worldview
• whoa! the chapters where they go into “fishtown” and interact with “afriatics”. well, it was written in the 90s. this did not age well. on the flip side, there’s something pretty frank and weird about the way that race is discussed in here, cognizant of racial divergences while being incredibly tone deaf in the discussion.

weak ending, with about as cliche a courtroom exoneration as you can scrape together. there’s even an awkward shout out to usenet and first person world building games in the closing chapters. the dude was cranking out the last few chapters as the publisher was putting the screw to him. i was amused, but i was constantly flipping to the back to see how much more i had to wade through during the last 70-ish pages. (09-Jan-2025)

recommendation: not really.

replay: memoir of an uprooted family (jordan mechner)

i got this on a recommendation from a friend and burned through it in a couple of sittings. it’s a graphic novel and these don’t typically trip my trigger or even come onto my radar. it’s not an anti-graphic novel bias, i just don’t gravitate seem to be plugged in there. that said, i have a tendency to read graphic novels as if they’re books, focusing solely on the text and the dialogue. i have to re-train myself to relax the eyes and take in the visual context of what’s going on in the scene. there’s a lot here that goes unsaid in the text that adds considerably to the story. the posture and tone of his teenage kids, the focus the subjects in a frame in their surroundings. along with a much better appreciation for the relaxation of holiday and life, even during wartime. it was a moving book. (08-Jan-2025)

recommendation: highly recommended.

the quickening (elizabeth rush)

this was an interesting and engaging read throughout. as a middle aged dude the discussion around the desire to be a mother didn’t really land like i suspect it would for others. still, that was an interesting way to structure the book and to put some personal immediacy around it. the discussion about life on an antarctic research vessel studying glaciers … that shit was riveting and really well done. (02-Jan-2025)

recommendation: yes, read it.

the bogleheads guide to investing (mel lindauer, et al)

i’m an unabashed boglehead. this was a refresher and a reminder to pay attention to various bits of planning. now if you’ll excuse me, there are some spreadsheet updates i need to make. (01-Jan-2025)

recommendation: highly recommended.