Five Books that got me through 2023
Immense World by Ed Yong — This book illuminates the senses of animals. It’s the same feeling as I got watching a Bill Nye episode, or a Sci Show video, or hearing a titan-sized factoid from NOVA. However, Yong takes us on an in-depth tour of the amazing — and often overlooked — senses of animals, ranging from echolocation in bats and the mighty noses of dogs and birds, to electric messages in fish. The book also introduced me to the lovely concept and word Umwelt: The idea that every living creature (including humans) has a unique sense of communication and experience. This book tries to put you in the turtle shell, on the back of a migrating bird, in the mind of a mantis shrimp that has one of the strongest punches in the world. Don’t doubt animals. They can do things we could never do, and their world is not something to think less than, but to honor, protect, and sit back and be in the big belly of awe.
Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh. Abortion is at the center of this novel. Without being didactic or agenda-driven, Jennifer follows a group of characters associated with a clinic, each holding different stances on this hot-button, election-influencing topic. It says something that most of Haigh’s characters are men — for so much of the discourse and laws around women’s health have been shaped by men. Plus, Jennifer can write fully vivid and electric characters while charging a sky full of meaning in a conversation, or quiet moment with a character sitting on a couch. To be honest, I can’t remember if I read this in 2022 or in 2023. But either way, in our first full year post-wade, and the realities playing out every day, I kept thinking about this book throughout this year.
Against the Wind by Neal Gabler. This is a monster truck-sized book, clocking in at over a 1000 pages, and it growls with non-fiction might. This book is dense, maybe unnecessarily so, but I feel like it gave me a window into American politics better than a years worth of reading Politico, Puck, or Mike Allen posts. This covers the second half of Ted Kennedy’s life and the rise of conservatism. I dare you to check it out.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. I don’t know of a recent book that has shifted my thinking in such a drastic way than Klein’s polemic, memoir, and educational portrait of what it means to exist in our current times. For me, the hottest fire she starts is questioning the doppelgagner I encounter and tend every day: the personal brand. Your online self is a doppelgagner, an often self-optimized entity — it’s you trying to be disciplined and clean. It’s a digital avatar chasing clout, the matrix of likes, engagement, and a flimsy-formed “should.” I should be this, I should be that. Clout, Klein would argue, is about the reach of your share, not the substance of your share, it’s wanting external validation, rather than internal joy. Clout chasing sucks up so much attention. Instead, Klein wants us to focus our attention on the world around us: climate change, political threats, local issues, poverty, costly medical care, and so much more. It’s easy to fall into the clout machine, to be warped into a strange version of your real self, chasing something you think you should be, rather than being the messy, living, wonderful human that you are.
Democracy Now! Okay, this one isn’t a book, but it’s one of the most important media creations ever. It has been a great media companion this year. As it always states, it’s the war and peace report. Amy Goodman has created one of the most important outlets for news. Day-in and day-out she reports from the silences. Every show has a galaxy of stories, human drama, heartbreak, and gushing reality. It’s hard news and truth, and at the end every broadcast I feel like I know more about the world. I feel like an informed citizen.
Three more things:
The New Yorker recently ran an excellent piece on Nvidia, the manufacture that creates GPUs, the microchip that powers A.I. It’s at once a profile of the company and their CEO, and a warning shot, a slow gloop of realization that this tech is races forward. And it’s a reminder that hardware, and people, are always behind the most popular software.
Holy goldfish. Once They Were Pets. Now Giant Goldfish Are Menacing the Great Lakes, reporting from Livia Albeck-Ripka in New York Times.
This profile of Amy Goodman from Marina N. Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine: “I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe, that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day,” she says. “War and peace, life and death. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.”
Dig hard.
END IT.