My 2019 book list, and the two factors that make a great bookstore
2019 was another strong year. I managed to top 2018 and get to the nice, round number of 48. Now that I’ve done my year in review for three years running, I’ve got some nice trends to look at. You can also check out the 2018 and 2017 editions.
I’ve thrown more fiction and memoirs into the mix, at the cost of non-fiction. (Though I suppose memoirs are non-fiction.) It’s been a satisfying year, and you can find out below about what I learned and what you should be reading.
In 2019, I discovered what defines a good bookstore. In the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge (aka HBS), I had found a little slice of heaven. Moving to New York, I struggled to adapt to the offering. Books Are Magic, in my neighborhood, is too small. The Center for Fiction, though better and also not too far, eschews any discernible logic in its display order (also, unsurprisingly, it’s short on non-fiction). The Strand is great, but too large.
I then went to Princeton for a day trip, and explored Labyrinth Books. It was great and, I think, similar to HBS. I realized that they share two key elements which, to me, define a great bookstore.
First, it should be large enough to have a good selection, but also moderate enough that one could casually browse most of it in under an hour. I’ve both spent evenings at HBS and stopped by to kill 15 minutes, easily prowling through different sections and spotting interesting books in various genres.
Second, it should have a strong remainder and/or used section. These lower-priced items allow one to take risks on books they wouldn’t otherwise buy. I am an advocate of buying books at local stores: I bought three paper books from Amazon in 2017 and 2018 combined, and none in 2019. (I’ve bought several titles on Kindle but the majority of my reading is done in print.) Having said that, books can be expensive and having options across a range of price points will have me coming back. (Frequent-buyer rewards are nice, too: they got me to spend nearly $700 at HBS in the last three years...)
Take note, purveyors of books.
Now for my recommendations. The books I found most interesting and significant (in no particular order) were:
- Tristram Hunt, Cities of Empire
- Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature
- Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox
This has also been a year of reading multiple works by the same author, and I would highlight three in particular.
The first group are Primo Levi’s memoirs and reflections about his experience as a Holocaust survivor. These are three books, but they really form a unified narrative: Se questo è un uomo, La tregua, and I sommersi e i salvati. I read them in Italian, but they’re readily available in English, too (If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved, respectively).
The second set are by William Langewiesche. American Ground is an excellent book, and his long-form essays on the failures of humans, machines, and systems (especially in aerospace) are a fascinating body of work.
Finally, Aleksandar Hemon. He is my favorite novelist, but his non-fiction The Book of My Lives (a memoir) and My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You (half memoir about his parents and half quirky, memoiristic short stories) are outstanding. His writing captures experiences in my youth growing up in the Balkans, as well as those in my adulthood of what it feels like to resettle to a country that is not one’s own. (I had the opportunity to have lunch with him in December, which made me really happy.)
In fiction, I’ve most enjoyed an extraordinary crime novel, a disturbing science-fiction parable, and a thrilling tale of revolution in space:
- Hideo Yokoyama, Six Four
- Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
- Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Now for the downers.
Despite being recommended by two people whose taste in books I trust, I found Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger to be unreadable. I made it a chapter and a half before throwing in the towel: while the substance was potentially interesting, the way it was written made it hard for me to follow. (Abandoning books that I’m not enjoying, rather than suffering to the end, is a skill I’m trying to learn.)
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is built on such an intriguing premise that I was really disappointed to see how the story developed. I thought it could have been much, much more.
Finally, if you want my take on some other books, here’s the ones I’ve reviewed in 2019:
- Algorithms as politics: Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry
- The Secretary’s manual: Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon by Ash Carter
- Catch-28: The Capital by Robert Menasse (my first-ever review of a novel)
Off to another bookishly exciting year ahead in 2020!
Author’s note: I added Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress to the fiction section on February 8, 2020, when I realized I had forgotten it in my original list.
