The Books That Stuck With Me the Most In 2016
One of my main hobbies is reading—although I rarely respond as such when asked about my hobbies at parties, since doing so sounds so uncool.
Of the 24 books I read in 2016 (12 fiction and 12 non-fiction, if you’re curious—but who’s counting?), these are the five that stuck with me the most. Not my favorites, not the ones I think are objectively “the best,” just the five that most obviously came to mind when I was drafting this list.
If you asked me for a book recommendation in 2016, I probably recommended one of these, and you are probably now annoyed to learn that my recommendation was based on nothing but the availability heuristic.
Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz: This book argues that today’s elite college graduates are caught on an endless treadmill of aimless, misdirected achievement, with a violent risk aversion conspiring to deprive them of a meaningful life. Half of it had my neck sore from nodding in agreement; the other half is just a more eloquent version of “kids these days.” I was predisposed to like this book because it validates my existing life choices, and guess what? I liked it.
Katy Perry, by Noam Friedlander: I hooked up with a girl who had this book in her apartment, and when I complimented it, she gave it to me. It now sits on my coffee table, where I look at it every day, and am thus reminded of the girl much more often than I otherwise would be. In this way, a gift can serve as a subtle mechanism of control by the gifter to the recipient.
My Dirty Dumb Eyes, by Lisa Hanawalt: This year, I developed an uncontrollable obsession with the TV show BoJack Horseman — when I completed the last episode, I went immediately back to the first and watched the entire show again from start to finish, something I’d never done before — and after discovering the show, I bought this book of cartoons by one of the series’ co-creators. The book, like the show, combines childlike animal jokes, surrealist absurdism, and garish sexual humor; it’s the kind of book I would give to a person I was falling in love with, in order to both impress them with my taste in books and provide a subtle warning of what they’re in for with me.
Private Citizens, by Tony Tulathimutte: A scene from this book, in which a group of college friends reunite on a camping trip in Northern California, eerily paralleled a recent experience from my own life, down to one of the fictional and real friends sharing an uncommon name (Henrik). If I were a human in the year 2150 building a hyper-realistic computer simulation of existence in the year 2016, I would probably reuse a bunch of simulated experiences with only minor variations between them. This book thus further convinced me that our entire world may be a simulation created by humans of the future and that, if so, the name Henrik has become much more popular.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer: When reading anything, I inevitably imagine myself as the protagonist of the story, even if that protagonist is Hitler. I’m not saying that I would ever become the creator of a totalitarian regime, but if I did, I would focus a lot more on building a sustainable culture. Also, I would make sure to have at least one co-founder, to guard against self-destructive bouts of megalomania.
