My 2023 in Non-fiction

Hi again everyone.  Time for my annual reading review and the usual stuff applies.  This is the non-fiction list: the fiction list is here, and the higher education lists are here and here.  It doesn’t quite include all the books I read (I leave out the truly crap and spare you some of the more technical business books, or the Dungeons and Dragons stuff I read to keep ahead of Little Miss Sumo), but it’s close.  My non-fiction list this year was about 90 books, with a pretty heavy tilt towards Asian history – Japan, China, and Central Asia in particular.  Much less about sports than usual. 

So much for prologue.  Onwards!

The Canadian Stuff

For reasons that defy rational explanation, I read Bill Morneau’s Where to From Here: A Path to Canadian Prosperity.  I wrote about it back here.  I do not recommend.  Governing Canada: A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics by former Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick is not uninteresting as an explanation of how power works (or should work) at the highest levels, but IMHO it’s not as good as Ian Brodie’s At the Centre of Government. 

Turning to provincial politics, I quite enjoyed Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney  (Bratt, Sutherland and Taras, eds), which is a pretty thorough account of the first term of the UCP government (Lisa Young’s chapter on post-secondary, in particular, was excellent).  More provinces need books like these.  I also read Rosemary Speirs Out of the Blue: The Fall of the Tory Dynasty in Ontario, mainly to try recall the fine constitutional details of how the Peterson minority government actually took power.  It’s actually pretty trippy, seeing both how much Ontario has changed in 40 years and how it hasn’t (John Tory, then a Bill Davis staffer, takes up a lot of space).  On the municipal front, I also read Daniel Sanger’s Sauver La Ville: Project Montréal et le défi de transformer une métrople moderne (which has since been released in English), which had its ups and downs.  I liked it because it really nailed the ups and downs of creating a political party capable of taking power, and because it’s probably the most detailed book ever published in Canada on municipal government.  The blow-by-blow of every municipal by-election for 15 years I probably could have done without.

Turning to Canadian history, there was Becoming Vancouver: A History, by Daniel Francis, which is a competent piece of urban history.  I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to read it, but if Vancouver is of interest to you, it’s worth your time.  And then there was The Rowell-Sirois Commission and the Remaking of Canadian Federalism Robert Wardaugh and Barry Ferguson.  I really liked this book, mainly because it gave a real flavor of how policy-making actually worked in the 1930s (the idea of commissioners making policy slowly. Collaboratively, on a 4-day train ride from Ottawa to Vancouver seems unbelievably quaint and yet at the same time actually really cool).  It probably would have been better if it had extended into the post-war period to examine how the ideas that came up in the commission actually were put into practice, but it’s a worthwhile read nevertheless.

Finally, there was Valley of the Birdtail: an Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson.  This is really an excellent book, set in Northwestern Manitoba, in the neighbouring communities of Rossburn and Waywayseecappo.  I don’t quite buy all of the book’s historical approach (this being literary non-fiction, immigration and indigenous policy is overly ascribed to a couple of individuals rather than to something more systemic) but boy is this a smart way of talking about reconciliation.  The dive into Ukrainian-Canadian history is especially savvy because of the way it shows that there is more than one way to lack privilege. 

The American Stuff

I had high hopes for Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, after his truly excellent book Evicted.  But like many others, I found the follow-up somewhat disappointing.  Meanwhile, since I took a wonderful trip to LA with Little Miss Sumo in October, so that led me down a specifically Angeleno path of reading.  I finally got to read the 50 year-old classic Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which still kinda works (apart from the sections on beach communities).  Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles by Rosecrans Baldwin is a pretty good take on 21^st Century LA.  Finally, there was The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space by William David Estrada which – as the title indicates – focuses on that small space just west of Union Station where the city began 250 years ago.  It’s ok.  Good on how different waves of immigration changed central LA, but really nothing special.

Native Peoples of the Southwest by Trudy Griffin-Pierce was (I think) designed to be a textbook, but it’s a reasonably good survey of a clutch of indigenous cultures that are somewhat outside the continental mainstream. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry was (I think) similarly designed for the textbook market.  It’s interesting in the way it tries to restore agency to Southern women and blacks during the civil war period.  Nathalie Kich’s Arid Empire is a short treatise on the connections between the Arizona desert and that or the Arabian peninsula, which for me elicited a lot of “no kidding?” moments without actually rising to the level of a compelling holistic thesis. 

The Nineties, byChuck Klosterman is a pretty good book about a decade that doesn’t quite gets its due, but it’s a terribly American book, which is too bad because of all the countries in the world, America is maybe the one that changed the least.  I’d love to see a more global history of that decade.  Finally, there was Lainey Newman & Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party, a book which started its life as Newman’s undergraduate (!) thesis.  It sounds hackneyed (deindustrialization = loss of unions = declining Democrat vote share), but what’s interesting about this book is identifying the mechanisms by which unions held up the Democrat vote in the first place (tl;dr: union halls, a dense network of social clubs and union-run media), and how each of these was gradually allowed to fall into disuse and replaced by, among other things, gun clubs.  Interesting for me was the distinction between the roles and paths followed by industrial (place-based) unions vs, “international” (trade-based) unions.  Not sure I have ever seen a similar analysis for Canada but would sure like to.

The Japanese Stuff

I read altogether too much on Japan this year (again, largely because of a trip there with LMS in March).  In fact, it’s possible I’m getting to the bottom of the barrel on mass-market English language works on this subjects.  Might be awhile before I pick up any more on this subject.  In any event, I read

Peter Harmsen’s three-Volume series War in the Far East  (Storm Clouds over the Pacific: 1931-1941, Japan Runs Wild 1942-43 and Asian Armageddon 1943-45).  It’s…ok.  Think of it as a mirror-image of Ian W. Toll’s Pacific Trilogy, which covers more or less the same ground from the American side.  For me the most interesting bits were in the first volume and had to do with how the rise of Hitler and its effect on Soviet diplomacy and re-armament affected the War in China from 1938-41.  The Fall of Japan: The Final Weeks of Worl War II in the Pacific by William Craig obviously covers much of the same ground as Harmsen’s last volume but in much more detail.  I found it slightly more rewarding because of the tighter focus.  It was the same with Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbour bSteve Kemper (which is sort of a Japanese equivalent to Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts), though this one was less insightful with respect to Japanese decision-making than it was to the idiosyncrasies of American foreign policy under FDR.

Going back a ways historically, I read The Japanese Myths: a Guide to Gods, Heroes and Spirits by Joshua Frydman, which is actually a pretty neat and tidy guide to the subject (big thing I learned is why Japanese refer to Cucumber maki as “kappa” maki – very odd story).  Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan by Danny Chaplin might be the best single history in English of the country’s unbelievably long civil conflict 16^th and 17^th centuries, although as with most such works it suffers from a serious lack of maps.  I somehow managed to plow through Cambridge History of Japan 4: Early Modern Japan.  Also, Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo by Timon Screech and A History of Popular Culture in Japan From the Seventeenth Century to the Present by E. Taylor Atkins, both of which are competent but not super-compelling guides to their subjects

Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World 1852-1912  by Donald Keene is a door-stopper of a book, which is not great because Meiji himself (unlike the era names after him) wasn’t all that interesting.  André Sorensen’s Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century and Peter Popham Tokyo: The City at the End of the World are definitely must-read for urbanists (the latter moreso than the former, which is fairly 70s-80s focussed).  Ashes to Awesome: Japan’s 6000 Day Economic Miracle by Hiroshi Yoshikawa is not what I would call super-compelling economic writing, but it is effective at conveying exactly how big a transformation the country underwent from 1945 to 1960 – mainly (to my surprise, anyway) – via incredibly rapid urbanization.  1964 – The Greatest Year in the History of Japan by Roy Tamizawa is an interesting peek at what Japan looked like at the end of the period Yoshikawa describes, although it is perhaps too concerned with that year’s Olympics than with other economic/social aspects.  And finally, Tobias S. Harris’ The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan is a decent biography of Abe and how he changed Japan (or didn’t). I imagine there is a revised version on the way which takes into account his assassination and its aftermath – I’d wait for that before buying.

The Stuff From the Rest of Asia

Starting with China, I read The Chinese Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Legends by Tao Tao Liu, which comes from the same series as the Frydman book on Japanese myths (see above).  Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (Khanna and Szonyi, eds) is a really interesting look at how meritocracy developed in both countries and how conceptions of merit (both ancient and modern) have shaped political culture.  One of those books I wish everyone in the US who bangs on about testing and meritocracy could read (guys: it’s not neo-liberalism).  The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China  by Timothy Brook is a short look at how the advance of the 16ht/17^th century Little Ice Age – and its accompanying effects on food production – can be traced through commodity prices recorded by Ming officials.  You probably have to have some affinity for economic history to find that one interesting.  The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West and Broke the Republic of China by James M Zimmerman is a re-counting of a train-hijacking cum hostage-taking in Hebei province in 1923.  It’s an interesting tale in and of itself but the claims as to its effects on world history are laughably overblown.  Finally, I read Jennifer Pan’s Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for Its Rulers, which was an intriguing look at how welfare programs in China are harnessed in such ways as to ensure social control. 

I spent the first week of the year in Taiwan and read two books on that country’s history Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 was so-so.  It recounts the role that Taiwanese played in Japanese expansionism, and does so in a way that actually gives agency to the Taiwanese.  But to be frank a lot of this agency was pretty marginal and working it up into a book-length treatment didn’t really make the argument any better.  A much better book was Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West by Tonio Andrade.  The title needs some back-story.  “China” here means a rogue Ming general named Koxinga who was looking for a base to fight against the newly-ascendant Qing dynasty in Beijing, and “the West” means the Dutch East India company, which briefly in the 17^th century claimed sovereignty over the island long before any Imperial government in Beijing ever did (China technically only ever claimed sovereignty over the whole island for about nine years, between 1886 and 1895 and even then it had to be bullied into it by the Japanese).  Anyways, Andrade’s book is excellent and treats the two sides’ stories pretty even-handedly. 

I also managed to get to both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan this spring (if the latter is not on your bucket list it really should be – Samarkand is bloody brilliant.  So this set me up to read a ton about the place.  Best place by to start is the present day with Erika Fatland’s Sovietstan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan which is travel writing of the highest order.  I would move next to Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present byAdeeb Khalid which is a decent history of the region (which Khalid’s expands to – rightly, I think correct – include Xinjiang).  Good stuff, relatively broad.  His Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire and Revolution in the Early USSR is a bit narrower but is a really interesting book on how nationalism and socialism co-evolved in this part of the world, mainly because reality needed to be molded to Stalin’s theories of nationhood.  Very thought-provoking.   Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Iran by Dilip Hiro is more focused on the post-1989 histories of these countries: not a bad book, but if you’ve read Fatland and Adeeb, I’d argue it doesn’t add much.  Going back in history a bit, we get to Marie Favereau The Horde: How Mongols Changed the World which is not bad but I didn’t think merited a lot of the hype it received.  After all that, I even attempted The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: the Chingissid Age (Di Cosmo, Frank and Golden, eds), which I genuinely do not recommend to anyone not doing degree-level studies in the area.  Both of the last two books could have done with a lot more maps. 

A last book to show-horn in here is The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 by Geoffrey B. Robinson.  Meh. 

The Turkish/Middle Eastern Stuff

I had a great time spending a week in Istanbul back in July, so I spent a fair bit of time reading about Turkey, the Ottomans and before that the Byzantines.  From most ancient to most recent: Lost to the West: the Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization by LarsBrownsworth is kind of quotidian: it gets the job done to give a basic overview of Byzantine history, but it’s not particularly inspired.  Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes takes in a longer view – possibly too long – but it’s a better book overall.  Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone only starts in the Ottoman period, and is not bad but may in fact be too short to really get to grips with the region’s story. Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire by Alev Scott is more travelogue than actual history, but it’s pretty good nonetheless.  It’s a meditation on the relationship between Ottoman history and Turkish history, and the enduring imprint of Ottoman-ness on all the non-Turkish bits of Empire.  Good both for people interested in Turkey and the southern end of the Balkans.  Finally, there was Dimitar Belchev’s Turkey Under Erdogan: How a Country Turned From Democracy and the West.  Not bad, but I would argue less compelling than Hannah Lucinda Smith’s Erdogan Rising: the Battle for the Soul of Turkey.   

As for the rest of the region:  The 80-page Octobre Liban by Camille Ammoun is an interesting participant-eye-view on the events that led to the protests of 2019.  Samir Kassir’s 550-page Beirut is in a sense the opposite of Ammoun’s book – a 2000-year history of the city which  probably would mean a great deal more to someone who had ever been there (I haven’t).  Noah Feldman’s The Arab Winter: A Tragedy is a not-entirely persuasive defense of the Arab Spring’s achievements despite the near-total failure of any of the countries to make their way to some form of democracy (and this even though the book was written wen Tunisia could still be seen as a success).  And finally, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar, a very personal reflection on the Qaddafi era and its immediate aftermath  by the son of one of Qadaffi’s greatest domestic foes, is a very moving take on loss and exile, but since it stops before the civil war of 2012, it’s not a book which sheds a great deal of light on current events there (I am not sure such a book exists yet).

The European Stuff

As usual, a substantial portion of my Europe reading was from the eastern end of the continent.  The best by some distance was Karl Schögel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World which is simply wonderful.  I might rank it a little lower than his tremendous Moscow 1937 but not by much.  Yes, it’s a doorstopper, but I guarantee that you’ve never seen annales-school history done this way (the chapter on Soviet doorbells and the complications of contacting the right person in a communal apartment alone is worth the price of the book).  I also read Schögel’s Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland, which was a bit less impressive (it seems to have been a collection of essays rushed out just after the 2014 invasion), but still pretty good.  Goodbye Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski got quite a lot of good notices, and I’d say the first third or so is pretty excellent in the way it shows off the region’s common inherent multiculturalism, a reflection of the fact that Empire was something that happened to people throughout the region – in that sense it’s a good pairing with Alev Scott’s Ottoman Odyssey (see above).  After that it got pretty Poland-centric, and while it never ceased being a good book, it fell out the “great” category the longer it went on.  Andrew Demshuk’s Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany was slightly less interesting than I’d hoped, but it is still a pretty good book for understanding how people got cool things done despite the socialist bureaucracy (and oh my God that bureaucracy was worse than you can possibly imagine).

Two good books on Britain this year.  First, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain bySathnam Sanghera, which is very good indeed on Britain’s amnesia about its conquests, slavery and racism and how they shape modern worldviews and politics.  An excellent companion to this is Stephanie Barczewski’s Heroic Failure and the British, whichargues that one of the ways managed to maintain a self-induced innocence with respect to Empire was to celebrate losers instead of winners.  Not all losers, obviously – just the ones that managed to get themselves killed with a modicum of gallantry.  An interesting thesis and a set of stories well told. 

Finally, there was Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After the Second World War by Paul Betts which is kind of a global history of post-war Europe, focusing not just on Europe itself (both East and West) but on Europe’s colonies as well.  Basically, it wasn’t just a matter of Europeans learning to live with each other, but also (in many cases) learning to re-imagine their own identities shorn of colonial possessions.  Some of this terrain has been covered in more detail by Elizabeth Buettner in Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture, but Betts puts the colonial story into a continental rather than a national political context.  It’s good stuff.

Business

Since I run a business, I read business books.  Many are crap or so highly specialized (you don’t want to read about Knowledge Management techniques any more than I want to write about them) so I just leave ‘em out.  But there were two in particular I thought were worth mentioning.  The first was The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World  by Walter Keichel III.  For me this was a genuine find: part-history of Big Consulting, part intellectual history of the “Big Ideas” that each of the Big Consultants peddled.  Some of it is pretty appalling, but overall it’s actually a very interesting walk through a history of business ideas. And for those of you that actually run a business, I cannot recommend Claire Huges Johnson’s Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building enough.  Maybe it’s a little heavy on “practical” worksheets for my taste, but what she has to say about culture and scaling is truly excellent.  Two thumbs up.

Economics/Public policy

I also read a lot of books that come loosely under the headings of economics and public policy.  I guess some of them could go under “business” but that doesn’t feel quite right.  The most fun, by far, was Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.  Think of this as the much-less credulous version of Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, written by someone who understood all along that bitcoin was a scam (“imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved sudokus you could trade for heroin” are the best fifteen words ever written on a financial mania).  Good fun.   Richard C. Koo’s Pursued Economy: Understanding and Overcoming the Challenging new Realities for Advanced Economies  is interesting, in the sense that it advances a set of coherent proposition about i) why economic growth slows as a country nears the technological frontier, ii) why it is the manufacturing sector that is most vulnerable to pursuit by trailing economies, and iii) how standard policies to deal with resulting rise in inequalities tends to depress innovation and lower future growth rates.  It’s a story that fits the facts, but partly for that very reason it can feel like a just-so story.  And I say that as someone who thinks Koo’s policy prescriptions are mostly right.

Long-time readers will know that I find Mariana Mazzucato a frustrating writer: good on specifics but maddeningly off-track and prone to wild overstatement when it comes to theorizing.  The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps Our Economies, byMariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington is an above-average outing.  The way it collects details of how certain governments –mainly the UK’s – have contracted out many central functions (not just policy development but – particularly during COVID – policy delivery as well) to Big Consulting is important.  Where it is less useful is in working out why any of this is happening. I think for the authors its just “obvious” neo-liberalism. But it strikes me that there is somethig about modern politics which is making politicians trust public servants less and seeking alternatives. It’s a more interesting and more nuanced story than what is presented here, I think.  Meanwhile, How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy, by Ranier Kattel, Wolfgang Dreschler, Erkki Karo (all three, as the title implies, disciples of Mazzucato) is a real contender for the Best Book/Worst Title combo.  The book in fact speaks to nether issue but is a nevertheless very good guide to the history and organization of science and innovation agencies around the work (I wrote more about it back here).

Why Politics Fails by Ben Ansell, is a UK-centric analysis of how democratic politics has become paralysed and vulnerable to populist attacks.  I had high hopes because I like Ansell’s analyses generally, and its not wrong, exactly, just maybe not particularly exciting.  Andrew Leach’s Between Doom and Denial is a nice, short – actually, too short – brief on how to think about Environmental Policy and how .  Lorenzo Codogno and Giampaolo Galli’s Meritocracy, Growth and Lessons From Italy’s Economic Decline was so-so.  The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale, by John A. List is an interesting concept but frankly isn’t executed particularly well.  As for Yanis Varoufakis’ Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism, well…you can see why he’s a good polemicist, but that doesn’t mean you should actually pay any attention to him.

Miscellaneous

And we’re now down to the stuff I can’t cram into any other category.  David DePierre’s A Brief History of Oral Sex managed to make a titilating subject boring (but what was I expecting, really?).  Gaia Vance’s Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World delivered much less than promised (it ended up being more about refugee policy than climate-induced movement).  I only got through two football books this year: Rory Smith’s Expected Goals: the story of how data conquered football and changed the game forever and Emancipation for Goalposts: Football’s Role in the Fall of Yugoslavia by Chris Etchingham.  Smith’s book is a surprisingly engaging account of a half-dozen or so of the sport’s data mavens (well, the ones related to the English game anyway); Etchingham’s is a non-sensational look back at the various Yugoslav teams of the 80s and 90s and their  clubs’ relationships with the various ethno-political factors of the time.  If you’re not especially into football, there’s no reason to read either, but if you are then I’d recommend both. 

Finally, two historical works.  The first, about thirty years old now, is Jeffrey M. Paige’s Coffee and Power, which is a really interesting piece of comparative economic and political history, focusing on El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.  The argument made is that the structure of the coffee economy dating back to the nineteenth century in each country explains the way that social confrontation (or lack thereof) in the late twentieth century.  Its reasonably persuasive, and while I have no idea what this would look like if you fast-forwarded another 30 years, I’d really like to find out.  And finally, there was Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink, which tells the story of the British Empire on September 29, 1923, the day when the British Empire reached its largest physical extent.  It mostly focuses on the non-Dominions (Australia gets a chapter, Canada doesn’t), which means to a large extent it’s about the origins of the anti-colonial movements which would eventually come to power in the great wave of decolonization from 1947 to 1970.

A Top Six

This wasn’t a great year for new books.  Maybe after 1700 in the last nine years I’m starting to get to the point where there just aren’t that many good ones left in the areas that interest me.  Anyways, I couldn’t really come up with enough to populate a Top Ten worthy of the name; but on the other hand I couldn’t narrow it down to just five, either.  So, in no particular order:

Valley of the Birdtail: an Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World Karl Schögel

Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West by Tonio Andrade

Sovietstan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan by Erika Fatland

Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present by Adeeb Khalid

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Huges Johnson

Happy reading in 2024.

My 2023 in Fiction

This wasn’t a great year for fiction for me.  Of the 44 works I read, I would say there were fewer than 10 I would recommend to anyone.  I need better recommendations, I think (suggestions welcome!) 

Sci-fi/Speculative

Let’s start with the worst book I read all year: The Exploding Book by Mike Russell (technically not sci-fi, more a deeply self-conscious fantasy) Avoid it like the plague.  Other books that did not impress me were Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, which I know has cult status in some circles, but whose characters I found mostly to be a tiresome collection of male stereotypes, with the Barkeep-as-Obvious-Refugee-From-a-Heinlein-novel thrown in.  Central Station by Lavie Tidhar was just tedious.

My daughter bought me the 40 year-old novelization of the Wrath of Khan Vonda McIntyre, which was obviously not good (what novelization is?) but it’s from my daughter, so obviously I read it.  The one absolutely hilarious detail in the book but not in the movie had to do with the computer banks that powered the Genesis device – I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say I’s a very 1980s understanding of how memory and programming works.  Also courtesy of Little Miss Sumo was Babel by R.F. Kuang. It’s borderline YA fiction about magic, colonialism, power and higher education.  It’s really not very subtle.  The best bit in the novel was actually my daughter’s marginalia – upon seeing the character from China mistakenly identify Oxford as a cattle-trading town, she wrote “Bovine University!”, which makes me think she’s going to be ok at the whole pop culture thing (it’s a Simpson’s reference of a fairly high order)

I normally love Becky Chambers (in particular A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit), but this year I read Record of a Spaceborn Few andTo be Taught, if Fortunate and was deeply underwhelmed by both.  It was the same thing with Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky, third in a series of books about vagrant humans teaming up with sentient spiders and octopi and roaming the Galaxy after Earth is blown out of existence by anti-Science fanatics.  Really liked the first two books in the series, thought the third was pretty meh.  And also the same with John Brunner’s The Infinitive of Go, which, while not uninteresting was not quite of the calibre of Stand on Zanzibar or The Sheep Look Up.

There were three books I really did like, though.  A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Venge is a pretty deft way .  The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff is a 1930s tale about the moon colliding with the Earth and its aftermath.  Tame enough, but the fact that the tale is told through the diary of rural English teacher with a ludicrous obsession in poultry breeding gives the whole thing a brilliantly Little England feel to it.  And finally, there was Provenance by Ann Leckie, a novel set in the same universe as her Imperial Radch trilogy.  It doesn’t have quite the sweep of those novels, but it is fun nonetheless.  Leckie is definitely my favourite sci-fi author at the moment.

Japan

I spent a wonderful couple of weeks in Japan with my daughter in March.  This set off a lot of reading of Japanese novels.  Scattered all over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, is a mildly entertaining meditation of the role of language and culture (it follows a Japanese woman’s travels around Europe in a world where Japan no longer physically exists).  There was not one but two feline-centric novels, I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki and The Cat Who Saved Books Sosuke Natsukawa.  Written over a century apart, the first is sort of a reflection of late-Meiji era mores and the latter one of those aggressively naif pieces of art that play so large in the Japanese imaginary.   Think Pokémon meets Sophie’s World and you have an idea of the tone.  The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada is not particularly naïve, although all the characters do slightly otherworldly tones which would be very familiar to anyone who has read Murakami.  It’s sort of Japanese magical realism, if you can call that a thing.

Automatic Eve by Rokuro Inui is sort of a steampunk Samurai story, albeit not a particularly memorable one.  Hiroki Takahashi’s Finger Bone is a pretty harrowing tale of an infrantryman on the retreat across New Guinea in 1943.  Spoiler: it ends badly.   Ryu Myurakami’s In the Miso Soup is – like most of his oeuvre – full of psychotic violence.  Not my favourite of his (that would be Popular Hits of the Show Era), but it’s not his worst effort either.

That leaves just three mystery books.  Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizo is post-war Japanese noir: not bad, but it’s light reading rather than thought-provoking.  Seicho Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express might be the most Japanese mystery ever since the entire plot revolves around train schedules (take that as a compliment, it’s actually quite a good early 60s novel).  And finally there was Hideo Yokoyama’s The North Light, which is a mystery novel about architecture and furniture-making.  I am not making this up (and it’s a petty good book).

Asia

Again, my reading tends to follow my travel schedule so there were anomalous levels Taiwanese and Central Asian fiction this year.  For Taiwan, I started with Vern Snider’s A Pail of Oysters, which technically is an American novel but is very good at capturing the poverty and venality of the early years of Nationalist rule on the island.  I also read two books by Wu Ming-Yi: The Man With the Compound Eyes and Stolen Bicycle. Both of then have a slightly Japanese feel to them, stylistically (which I suppose is also true of the island as a whole).  Personally, I preferred the latter, though YMMV.

Yan Lianke had a new book out called Heart Sutra, and it might have been my least favourite of his novels.  Not bad, exactly but not that interesting either.  Read Lenin’s Kisses or The Explosion Chronicles  instead.  A much better book was Korean Teachers by So Su-Jin.  It’s a half-dozen interrelated stories about precariously-employed Korean teachers at a language school attached to a prestigious university in Seoul (I have a feeling that if you were Korean, you’d be meant to know which one it was, but I couldn’t figure it out).  

In the spirit of trying to get into Central Asian literature, I read two books by Hamid Ismailov: The Railway (which I guess is meant to be an early Soviet period piece) and The Dead Lake  (a more specific meditation on the effects of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan).  I wouldn’t say either is a must-read; the latter is slightly more accessible.

The one really good novel I read from this part of the world – and I say this as someone who finds much of the Indian literature that makes it to North America deeply irritating – is Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor.  Money, class, politics, crime – it’s got pretty much everything and the prose just flies by.  Great stuff.

Europe

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a novella about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.  It’s wonderful.  Completely worth it.  Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, is a récit about the rise of Adolf Hitler’s, but in particular the events around the 1938 Austrian Anschluss.  It’s a genre that doesn’t really exist in English – not fiction, but not history either – but it’s a pretty compelling read in any event.  Gerald Reve’s The Evenings is a 1947 novel that follows the life of a twenty-something set in postwar Netherlands.  Apparently this is supposed to be the best novel out of the Netherlands in the twentieth century, which I have to say does makes Dutch literature sound pretty bleak.  Nefando, by  Mónica Ojeda, is a creepy tale of international students, parental abuse and video games.  Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinovstarts out as a Goodbye, Lenin story (let people live in whatever time period they want!) and then tips into something more bizarre (an EU-wide vote in which different countries vote to live in different decades).  I wish I could say it was interesting, but I can’t, not really.  Anyways, the

best work of European fiction I read this year though was Amara Lakhous’ Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, a multiple-unreliable-narrator story about race and identity in modern Italy.  It is so, so good.  Must-read. 

(I started Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob  – a tale of Jewish theology and messianic heresy set in 18^th century Eastern Europe from Warsaw to Istanbul – back in January, and still haven’t quite finished it nearly a year later, though I’m still optimistic I can do so by 11:59 on Sunday.  I recognize the level of accomplishment contained in this book – the background research must have been incredible – but JFC 965 pages is just totally unnecessary.)

North America

The two most American books I read – in the sense that you pick them up and it’s crystal clear from the style that they are written by Americans, no one else blends fantasy and quotidianness (quotidianity?) in quite this way.  The first was The Regional Office is Under Attack by Manuel Gonzales – something that starts off as a fun romp with an all-powerful squad of teenage female ninja assassins but eventually dissolves into something much more boring.  You can skip this one.  Anthem, by Noah Hawley, is a Jeffrey Epstein scenario set in a near future where hundreds of thousands of youth are committing suicide and a Trump-ish militia movement is planning a violent takeover of power.  It’s the better of the two books, but the sense of “wow, this book takes on a lot but still manages to end up somewhere short of satisfactory” is still there.

Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards was fun: murder, mystery and more at a swanky LA private school in 1982, simply dripping with pop culture reference, all but one of them note perfect (I am pretty sure that high school students in the West Hollywood Hills would not have been die-hard Duran Duran fans within weeks of their first album being released – the timing is off by a few months).  I’ve never read any other Ellis so I can’t tell how close this is in style to earlier works like Less Than Zero, but even without the reference it’s reasonably enjoyable.  The Girls, by Emma Cline, is about a woman’s experience in a Manson-ish cult.  A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson was my sole Canadian book this year, and, well, meh.

The one truly great North American book I read this year was Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture which is a one-night inner monologue of an female economist, just denied tenure but still condemned to deliver a guest lecture in the morning.  Did I say monologue?  Well, it’s actually more of a dialogue, only the other party is her subconscious’ version of John Maynard Keynes.  Weird, but brilliant. 

Elsewhere

I was really looking forward to Alvaro Enrigue’s Hypothermia because his earlier Sudden Death about a 17^th century tennis match between the poet Quevedo and the artist Caravaggio is one of my favourite novels of the last decade.  And it’s a good book – I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading it – but it’s not a great one.  Noor Naga’s If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English –  rich expat Egyptian returns to Cairo post-Tahrir Square and falls in love with a down-and-out photographer – is also pretty good, although I was underwhelmed by the experimental part III (read it – you’ll see). 

The Recommendations

And that, friends, is all she wrote for 2023.  My five solid recommendations from this lot would be:

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga, The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker, Provenance by Ann Leckie, Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor, and The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis.  And on top of that, I give you one absolutely, do-not-hesitate, go-read-it-for-yourself recommendation: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous.

My 2022 Non-fiction list

Y’all know the drill by now.  My fiction list is here.  My review higher education books (which I assume very few of you care about) can be found here and here (among other places).  This is just the non-fiction, which is a little under 100 books this year.  A bit more business and sports than usual (see below), and therefore a lot less of the usual history/politics/policy stuff that I usually drone on about.  In fact, I mostly missed whole chunks of the world this year: Canada, Latin America, Africa, India – I think I might have got in a half-dozen books total on all of those together.  Will have to do better next year, I guess.

History/Politics

Let’s start with the big historical series.  There are three of these I have vowed to get through by 2030 – the Cambridge History of China, the Cambridge History of Japan and the Oxford History of Britain (which in practice is actually just a history of England, but it was written long enough ago that people didn’t really bother with distinctions like that).  I didn’t read any from the China series this year, but I did manage to put down one from each of the other two (vols 3 and 7, respectively), which in both cases puts me about halfway through.  I think I’m going to make hit my goal for those two, but prospects on the China one look dim (I think I have about 10 volumes to go and am working backwards from vol.14)

Asia

Most of the really good stuff I read this year was about Asian history.  Conquering the Pacific by Andrés Reséndez was a simply fantastic book on the complexities of sixteenth century trans-Pacific navigation and the establishment of the Acapulco-to-Manila run in the 1560s.  I may be underselling it here, but trust me this is a great book: it packs the application of science to navigation, the complexities of interpreting how to apply the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (which divided the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres) in the Pacific Ocean when no one could yet measure longitude, XVIth century international politics and the cosmopolitan nature of transoceanic sea voyages into a tantatlizingly quick 240 pages or so.  Brilliant.  In a similar vein, In Asian Waters by Eric Tagliacozzo covers the interconnected nature of trade and exchange from Zanzibar to Vladivostok over the centuries in 14 quick essays (some of which are better than others).  I learned a ton from this book just from the bibliography.  From the more modern period, Development and Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia by Dan Slater and Joe Wong is more convincing as a survey of the possible range of relationships between the two concepts than it is as a categorization of developmental types (though this may just be the nit-picking of a historian reading a work of political science), but regardless, it contains a dozen of the best thumbnail national political histories of the post-war period you are likely to find anywhere – great stuff.

On Japan, I really liked Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is a really nice short book explaining how certain archetypal Tokyo streetscapes (eg the areas underneath and alongside raised rail lines) came to be, and is a must if you lie walking around the city a lot (Little Miss Sumo and I will be there 80 days, yay!).  The Monocle Book of Japan is mostly just eye candy.  The Roads to Sata, an autobiographical tale by a dude who walked literally from one end of Japan to the other, was fun even if there’s not much you can generalize about 1970s Japan to 2020s Japan. Ezra Vogel’s China and Japan: Facing History is an interesting summary of the intertwined history of the two countries, but it’s not of the same quality as earlier books like Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China and Japan as Number One.

What else?  Well, there was Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus, which I really should not have tried to read without already having a Bachelor’s degree or something in Hinduism because I think a lot of it went over my head.  I read two works of economics about China.  Jin Xu’s Empire of Silver: a New Monetary History of China is a millennium or two of Chinese economic history (tl;dr: that giant sucking sound from the 16^th to 19^th centuries was China hoovering up all available world silver and upending entire continent in the process) and Thomas Orlik’s China: the Bubble That Never Pops which is much more contemporary in orientation.  Both are competent books, but the former isn’t a page-turner, and the second doesn’t add much to the sum of world information on the topic of China (though this book is certainly less China-skeptical than most).  Alec Ash’s Wish Lanterns is a very worthwhile and revealing tracking of a half-dozen young-ish Chinese as they make their way into adulthood.  The Philippines, by Steven Rood from the Everything You Need to Know series is a very good introduction to the country: read it before you go if you can.  The Marcos Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave, starts off as an interesting history of the Marcos and Romualdez (that’s Imelda’s family) clans, as well as a forensic dismantling of Marcos’ claims of outlandish heroism in World War II.  This part is good because it tells you a lot about the way Filipino politics does really revolve around a handful of important families (Ferdinand and Imelda’s son BongBong was elected President last year) and how this dates from the American occupation.  But then, right about the time Ferdinand takes power, the book morphs into one part tales of American CIA activities in Southeast Asia and a second part batshit theories about the Yamashita treasure (Wikipedia entry on this dubious idea here but tl;dr the gist of the dubiousness is that Japanese looted all of southeast Asia and then unaccountably brought the horde not to Japan or Taiwan but to the Philippines where it was inevitably going to be picked up by the Americans).  Avoid.

Turkey/the Middle East

I was hoping to make it to Istanbul in the summer – revenge travel and all – but it did not work out.  I did however, do all the reading anyway.  For modern politics,I picked out Erdogan Rising: the Battle for the Soul of Turkey by Hannah Lucinda Smith and Frontline Turkey: the Conflict at the Heart of the Middle-East by Ezgi Basaran.  They are both pretty good, and underlined for me the extent to which the inability of the Turkish state to truly accept that Kurdish identities can co-exist with Turkish ones within a single state is central to most political decision-making in Turkey. If I had to pick one, I’d pick the Smith book because I like her writing style, and it’s a bit more current than the other one.  Going further back in history I read a quartet of books. To do this chronologically: New Rome: Empire in the East by Paul Stephenson, which as the title indicates deals is a history of the Byzantine Empire which is as good a choice as any if you’re going for a broad, centuries-long what-the-hell-happened-here-exactly approach.  John Freely’s Istanbul: The Imperial City, which is sort of a history of the city, but since the city was a capital for most of its existence, it doubles as a history of the Ottoman Empire, and then two histories of the Ottoman Empire proper: Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel and The Ottomans: Khan’s Caesar’s and Caliphs by Marc David Baer.  Osman’s Dream is meant to be the standard out of all of these and yeah, if you can only read one, read this one, but I got a lot out of reading these all back-to-back: particularly with respect to understanding the political role of harems (which are really wild – basically, emperors-to-be were kept in the harem, which were run by their mothers, basically to keep them out of politics until the moment of ascension, but that meant their mothers had huge political influence on the emperors to be, which in a sense made them the most powerful people in the empire, at least leading up to a transition of power).

On the rest of the Middle-East I read Ahmet T. Kuru’s Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison which I didn’t find particularly persuasive.  Justin Marozzi’s Islamic Empires is a history of the Islamic world in fifteen cities – basically a thumbnail sketch of the dominant city of each century since Mohammed showed up (so: Baghdad, then Cordoba,, then Cairo, etc).  It doesn’t really have a point, per se, other than that Islam is varied and has changed a lot over time, but I thought it was pretty well done.  Inside Qatar: Hidden Stories from One of the Richest Nations on Earth, by John McManus, is one of those books written to capitalize on the World Cup, except not by talking about the game but rater about what it is like to live there, both as a Qatari and as various types of expats.  It is very well done and would recommend to anyone interested in the Gulf.

Europe & Russia

As far as Europe goes, the two best books by far were about the Napoleonic era.  Alexander Mikaberidze’s The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, which delivers exactly what it says, and Mike Duncan’s The Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of revolution, The former is magisterial both in the sense of being a highly readable work of containing a great deal of scholarship from various parts of the world and in the sense of being literally a doorstop.  Read it anyway, it will do you good.  The latter is a highly readable (as you’d expect from the creator of both the History of Rome and the Revolutions podcasts) biography about a character who – given his role in so many world-historical events – you’d think would have attracted more attention by now.  An interesting lesson in how timing is everything in politics. Two thumbs up for that one, too.

Other than that, I read three books about Rome: Michael Kulikowski’s The Tragedy of Empire: from Constantine to the Destruction of  Roman Italy, Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian  (yeah, I know, this probably belongs with the Turkish books, but most of the action is in North Africa or Italy so I;m sticking it here) and Rome: a Cultural, Visual and Personal History by Robert Hughes, which literally does the full 28 centuries of the city itself.  Both of the ancient history books are good, but not great – read them if you’re into that stuff, but don’t go out of your way if that stuff doesn’t turn your crank.  Hughes’ Rome is really more for those with an interest in art history (also the case with his parallel work on Barcelona), which isn’t really the case for me, but I did find his final thoughts about how Rome has ceased to be a source of ideas in any field over the past few decades to be fairly intriguing.  Finally there was Swiss Made by R, James Breiding which I thought was going to be one of those books which probes a national economic/cultural model for clues to success but is really just a set of histories of an admittedly astonishing number of Swiss corporations which came to be world-beaters.  Avoid.

Naturally, given the big events of the year, I read a lot of Russian history.  Putin’s People, by Catherine Belton an analysis of the cronies (please, not oligarchs) who have surrounded Putin for the last 30 years, propelling and sustaining him in office, was intriguing without being a must-read (and I suspect has become a lot less relevant since February 24^th).  Fabrizio Fenghi’s It Will be Fun and Terrifying is an interesting view into the spread of brown/red (ie National Bolshevist) ideas in the hothouse atmosphere of early 90s Moscow.  It’s well-night impossible to make any direct links between arthouse provocateurs of the early 90s and the official Nazification of Russia today, but this book will make you think a bit about some of the intellectual roots of today’s madness.  Ben McIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor was a fun bit of cold-war nostalgia….real-life Le Carré stuff about a very high-level KGB double agent who worked for British Intelligence throughout the 70s and 80s.  Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union, by Vladislav Zubok, is a blow-by-blow view of the last 24 months or so of the Soviet Union – it’s well-written but there’s not a lot new in here and it’s overly Moscow-centric in its POV.  Good for remembering how fast various events came tumbling after one another though.  Better on that from is Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of the Post-War Stalemate by M.E Sarotte, which recounts the history of NATO-Soviet relations between 1989 and 2004 which is simply excellent – not just because it puts to rest the idea that any promises were made to Russia about NATO not expanding, but also how German re-unification really did have the potential to accidentally dismantle the western alliance.  A reminder about how easy it is for the entropy of even relatively recent events to be forgotten.

American History

A lot of my reading was driven by trips taken to the South and Southwest and planned but not taken to  California.  Katrina, a History, 1915 to 2015 is an intriguing story spanning a century about the decisions that led to Katrina and then it’s aftermath.  It’s not as simple as you think (black districts of the city were not disproportionately left to sink and the bull-headed bi-partisan solution to rising sea levels (build bigger levées!) are bi-partisan precisely because they don’t require much serious thought (the right supports it because it doesn’t require any behavioural change, and the left likes it because more construction means more union jobs).  Similarly, Douglas N. Harris’ Charter School City: What the End of Traditional Public Schools in New Orleans Means for Traditional Education looks at how the huge educational experiment that was conducted in the Hurricane’s aftermath played out.  The results were much more nuanced that either pro- or anti- voucher advocates would have you believe, and there is fodder here to chew on here in terms of guides to successful school management for everyone.  Kevin Starr’s Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance 1950-1963 (one of I believe six volumes in a series by this author) is just freaking great, a must-read for anyone interested in post-war America.  New Mexico: A History (Joseph Sanchez, Robert Spude and Arthur Gomez) is pretty pedestrian as a history, but the subject matter is actually pretty fascinating, particularly with respect to relations with First Nations but also the fact that it is the country’s only Hispanic-majority state). 

I thought Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the making of American Capitalism was over-rated, mainly because I find the need to invent historical figures’ interior monologues irritating and the need to liken every historical aspect of slavery to a part of the body to be needlessly prissy (to be fair, the second half of the book, which is more of a traditional economic history, is a lot better than the first).  Louis Menard’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, which is about how east-coast Brahminry worked in the mid-19^th century, was occasionally enlightening but I didn’t think hung together well as a book.  Soul City: Race, Equality and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia by Thomas Healy is an absolutely wild story about Floyd Kissick, a Black Power activist who thew his hat in with Richard Nixon in order to get grants required to start a Black-powered community in rural North Carolina.  The whole thing is as batshit as it sounds, but it makes for a great book.  Garrett Graff’s Watergate: a New History was tremendous: if your understanding of Watergate is (like mine was) mostly based on Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, prepare to have your mind expanded.  And finally, there was Indigenous Continent: the Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hamalainen.  In previous reviews I have praised his earlier works The Comanche Empire and Lakota America; in many ways, this book is even better (though I think it’s sadly a bit weak on events North of the 49^th parallel).  Recommended to absolutely everyone.

The Rest of the World

I read three books on Canadian history: The first, Dale Barbour’s Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967 was fun, but is really for Manitobans only.  The second, A Long Way to Paradise, A New history of British Columbia Politics by Robert McDonald (which I understand was published posthumously) would have been a better book if it has gone past 1972 and at least got to the point where the province looked more like its modern self.  As it is, the most interesting bits are about the province’s first couple of decades and the description of the no-party system which ran the province until the 1890s (which was all new to me, anyway).  Finally there was Dale Eisler’s From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation, which plays out the last 40-odd years of Saskatchewan history and attempts to explain how the country’s most left-wing province arguably became it’s most right-wing one.  Good provincial-level political writing, of a type that is not often seen these days.

As for the rest of the world: Hilda Sabato’s Republics of the New World is a modestly interesting tour of nineteenth-century state-building in the wake of the revolutions of 1808-1825.  Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point is a somewhat idiosyncratic history of India during the State of Emergency (1975-77) the highlight of which (IMHO) is the chronicling of Sanjay Gandhi’s disastrous attempt to create a domestic automobile champion, Maruti Motors.  Gideon Defoe’s The Atlas of Extinct Countries is good for airplane reading.

Economic History/Economic Policy

On Economic History and Economic Policy, I read a number of good books, the best of which were Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy and James Bessen’s The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate industries, Kill Innovation and Undermine Regulation.  The former is a really well-done look at how language and world-view of public-sector economics changed over the course of the post-war period.  I think the author occasionally over-does it on the demerits of the efficiency approach, but it’s nonetheless a huge contribution to understanding economic thought in the latter half of the twentieth century.  The latter, by an author I admire immensely (his 2015 book Learning By Doing is one of the very best ever pieces of economic history applied to the area of skills and skill acquisition), presents a not-entirely original thesis on the way that FAANG companies (among others) are destroying competition, but does present a lot of cleverly-collected and -analyzed evidence to support points which hitherto have had to be taken on faith, and so is still very much worth a read.

Slouching Towards Utopia: an Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Brad DeLong got a lot of attention in this year, but I thought it was overrated; it has a strong beginning on the origins of economic take-off in the latter half of the nineteenth century and a strong ending from the 80s onwards but the in-between stuff was nothing special.  Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, by Charles Marohn Junior, was for me a really interesting window into the economics of city planning (and certainly made me look at places like Albuquerque and Phoenix differently when I visited them in early June).  Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy, byStian Westlake and Jonathan Haskel, was an interesting extension of their earlier work Capitalism Without Capital (basically: intangible assets are both the new source of economic growth and being strangled for new funding over the past two decades, basically because markets don’t know how to price and securitize intangibles) but no more than that – the previous work is the better one. Fully Grown by Dietrich Vollrath’s is a useful but not terribly exciting explanation of why growth has been slowing for the past few decades, with a significant emphasis on demographics.  The Death of Human Capital by Philip Brown, Hugh Lauder and Sin Yi Cheung is a really not very good book which rests on (IMHO) a seriously selective understanding of what the concept of human capital actually represents.  Avoid.

Sports

I read a few more sports books than usual, mainly because of the World Cup.  The best of the football books was probably Welcome to Hell by John McManus (same dude who wrote the book on Qatar mentioned earlier), which is a superb mix of national-level football culture writing with national-level political culture analysis.  I highly recommend it.  I’d also like to recommend two books by friends: Female Fans, Gender Relations and Football Fandom by fellow higher education nerd Dominik Antonowicz (and two colleagues), which is admittedly of a fairly academic bent, and Reffing Hell: Stuck in the Middle of a Game Gone Wrong by the ever-optimistic Man in Black Ian Plenderleith (I aspire to one day get a review as good as the one Ian got from Ray Hudson on twitter.  Actual books on the World Cup?  Avoid Matthew Evans’ USA ’94: The World Cup that Changed the Game and Steven Scraggs’ In the Heat of the Midday Sun: The Indelible Story of the 1986 World Cup like the plague because they are genuinely tedious match-by-match accounts which are heavy on cliché.  Rhys Richards’ Blood on the Crossbar: the Dictatorship’s World Cup, about the Argentina World Cup of 1978, shares a lot of the/ match-by-match description tedium with the other two, but it’s nevertheless a much better book a) because there were fewer games back then and b) it’s accompanied by about 75 pages of interesting angles on opposition to the “General’s World Cup” both within the country and by human rights activists the world over.  Leo Moynihan’s Thou Shall Not Pass was a tolerable (if rather UK-centric) examination of the role of central defenders in modern football.  Warren St. John’s Outcasts United: The Story of a Refugee Soccer Team that Changed a Town is much more about a changing state of Georgia than it is about football.  The Defiant: A History of Football Against Fascism is a conceptual mess, a weird mishmash of stories about anti-fascist football in the 1930s and 1940s mixed with a bunch of stories about anti-capitalist football (NOT THE SAME THING) from the 2010s.  Redeeming feature: this book alerted me to the existence of the Tuscan football club CS Lebowski, which is just excellent. 

Other sports books?  I enjoyed Never Forgotten: Tales About Ron LeFlore, Ron Hunt and Other Expose Yarns from 1969 to 2004 but I think you have to be pretty hardcore Expos to want to read this one.  Mark Messier’s autobiography, No One Wins Alone is…interesting.  It certainly paints a different (and more flattering) portrait of Messier as a young man than any other source I’ve read.  On the other hand, it also reads to a considerable extent as if Messier’s finally had some time to think about what led to his success and he’s managed – whether alone or with a ghost-writer – to come up with some interesting and valuable lessons about work, focus, determination and leadership.  And you know what?  God Bless.

But the topic book in this category is, without a doubt, Glory Days: the Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That changed Sports And Culture Forever by L. Jon Werheim.  This was just excellent.  I have vivid memories of that summer but I had never put together exactly how much stuff happened in such a short period of time: the Oiler dynasty’s first win, the Celtics-Lakers final that put the NBA on the map, the Olympics and the US Dream Team are all obvious, but also: ESPN’s decision to start charging cable networks to carry them, the lawsuit that allowed US colleges to break free of the NCAA in terms of TV rights, and, perhaps most bizarrely, the story of the Jacksons’ Victory tour, which bankrupted its backers and eventually led (indirectly) to Robert Kraft taking control of the New England Patriots (and therefore I guess to Vladimir Putin getting a Superbowl ring).  Anyways, superb pop culture history.

Business

I read more business books that I usually do, most of them utterly forgettable, but I did greatly enjoy a trio of books by Henry Mintzberg: Strategy Safari, Managing, and The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, the latter two I heartily recommend to anyone who runs a business or studies organizations (the first one is good, too, but really requires having read Rise and Fall first).  Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’s Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners Around the World is worth a mention too because the first 60 pages or so on how to interview people is really excellent (the rest is kind of meh, though).  The rest I will pass over in silence.

Miscellaneous

And then, a bunch of books which don’t really fit into any other categories.  Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers byStephen Graham is one of those architecture/urban planning books which is a lot more interesting conceptually than in practice.  Ezekiel Emanuel’s book Who Has the World’s Best Health Care – which I read mainly to see if it would be possible to do something similar in higher education – was instructive mainly in the sense that it’s really hard to write comparisons which are short, informed, and multi-dimensional in a field as broad as health care.  Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards is a history of the first couple of decades of Dungeons and Dragons, but with a corporate focus on TSR and its operations in Lake Geneva Wisconsin (a place which itself had semi-mythical status for me and my equally D&D-obsessed friends in the early 1980s).  It’s about as depressing tale as one could conjure up about obscure IP disputes and nepotism as one could imagine and in many ways it’s a miracle the game survived.  Simon Rogers’ Facts are Sacred is a moderately informative look at how the Guardian practices data journalism (a term which at its best means detailed database analysis but often is just a synonym for “infographics”.  And then, finally, there was Benny Lewis’ Fluent in Three Months, a book of strategies to get fluent in new languages quickly, which I read because I need a new challenge.  Haven’t tried any of the new techniques yet – will let you know how it goes.

The Inevitable Top Ten List

I don’t think I can pick a top book here or any kind of ranking, but I think I can pick out the ten best overall.  In no particular order:

Conquering the Pacific – Andrés Reséndez

Glory Days: the Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That changed Sports And Culture Forever – L. Jon Werheim. 

Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy – Elizabeth Popp Berman

 The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate industries, Kill Innovation and Undermine Regulation.  ­ – James Bessen

From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation ­ – Dale Eisler

Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of the Post-War Stalemate – M.E Sarotte

Watergate: a New History – Garrett Graff

Indigenous Continent: the Epic Contest for North America – Pekka Hamalainen. 

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History – Alexander Mikaberidze

Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire – Caroline Finkel

And that’s all she wrote: happy reading in 2023.

My 2022 Fiction List

OK, I didn’t read all that much fiction this year (33 books by my count) , so this is shorter than usual.  The non-fiction list will be along shortly.

Campus Novels

Let’s start with these, ‘cause y’know, it’s me and campuses are what I do.  Naben Ruthnum’s A Hero of Our Time – the story of the son of a U of T English professor who joins an Edtech company bent on helping universities slim their payrolls – is…ok.  The pieces around identity politics are cleverer than most, and the book’s antagonist – a barely-disguised version of Elizabeth Holmes – is well above-average.  Lacks a satisfying ending, though.  Disorientation by Elaine Hsieu Chou, is a more straightforwardly modern campus novel – Female Asian (cue diversity themes!) doctoral student tires of her dissertation topic and contemplates the meaning of life when she discovers a secret that has the potential to entirely re-write her tiny corner of academia.  It’s entertaining enough, but I’d stick it in the beach read category.  Finally, there was Richard Russo’s Straight Man, which is apparently 25 years old (and is being developed for an AMC series with Bob Odenkirk in the lead role) but I had never heard of it until this year.  The man in question is the temporary head of the English department at a financially precarious public university in rural Pennsylvania (so a good read if you’ve been following the recent wave of institutional mergers in that state).  The caricatures of academic personalities are quite excellent (much better than those in the Chair, you ask me), the internal monologues of a forty-something realizing he has accomplished pretty much everything he is going to accomplished rings absolutely true (trust me), and the protagonist’s delight in using the tools of academic politics simply to sow chaos among colleagues he dislikes is simply wonderful (if you liked the scenes at the polytechnic in the Wilt series, you will love this book).  Two thumbs up.

Generally Meh Sci-fi/Fantasy/Flighty Fiction

I didn’t read a lot of sci-fi this yea, and what I did read didn’t exactly et my heart aflame.  I read two late-60s/early 70s classics (Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 and Ursula K. LeGuin’s Vaster Than Empires and More Slow, meditations on language and vegetative sentience, respectively, both of which I appreciated much more than enjoyed.  Charles Stross’ Empire Games ­– part of a multi-volume parallel world series – is meant to be a kind of “what if 9/11 happened but al-Qaeda were from a parallel 19^th century Pennsylvania and they could move back and forth between worlds, albeit with some difficulty?  It was OK, but I;m not minded to read the other two volumes.  Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was slightly less than OK.  Midnight Library by Matt Haig is not quite sci-fi, but since it’s kind of Sliding Doors in a library-cum-purgatory, I’ll throw it in anyway.  It is not a bad book, but it is pretty Oprah.   Guide yourself accordingly.

The emergence of a Tolkien-themed series on Amazon Prime(which I seem to have enjoyed a lot more than most of the critics) prompted me to go back to read Tolkien’s The Silmarillion again.  All I can say is that the decision to push all that weird mishmash of short stories, historical sketches and quasi-biblical Sagas was a very weird one on the part of his literary estate; the later decision to publish fuller book-length versions of many of the stories in this collection seems to make a whole lot more sense.  Then, just last month to cash in on the whole Rings of Power thing, the Tolkien estate put out a newly-assembled group of stories/notes/whatever about the Second Age, under the title The Fall of Numenor.  If you are a die-hard Tolkien fan, you obviously have to read it.  If you’re a more casual fan (or, like me, die hard 40 years ago but mostly just faking it to get street cred with a 13 year-old daughter), you can safely skip.

Very Strange Indeed

Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood is a series of 20-odd very short stories about an imaginary and magical Japanese…ward?  Town?  Village?  It’s never entirely clear.   Also from Japan, I read From the Fatherland with Love by Ryu Murakami, a not-very-believable thriller about a North Korean invasion of Fukuoka, in which the strong, disciplined Koreans initially overpowers an effete Japanese population let down by a spineless central government before being brought down by an all-male group of misfits, gun nuts and poisonous insect anoraks doing a DIY-insurrection.  It’s….well let’s put it this way, Murakami is pretty good at mayhem Popular Hits of the Showa Era is pretty awesome, for instance), but this one was too much for me.  The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which many people say is one of the landmark’s of 20^th century Turkish fiction, mainly convinced me that I shouldn’t read any more Turkish fiction.  The Movement, by Petra Hulova reads like an incel apocalyptic fantasy – a world rules by feminists where men are sent to some fairly vicious re-education camps so they can see women as “more than just cunts” (I won’t describe the course of re-education but it’s fairly graphic and doesn’t leave much to the imagination).  It’s not quite incel fiction – apart from anything else Hulova is as her name suggests a woman – and it mostly seems to be just a failed attempt at satire.  Maybe it’s the translation, I’m not quite sure.

Weird Stuff From or About the Soviet Bloc

It’s but a brief jump from Hulova’s dystopia to Victor Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger which is, I don’t know – Russian magical realism?  His style has a fair bit in common Vladimir Sorokin’s though I found this book more given over to tiresome philosophizing (like the bits of Dostoyevsky you skip over because Jesus fuck, there’s only so many hours in the day) than anything I’ve ever seen in Sorokin.  Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer is the story of a travelling basketball team in the early 1950s, ending – predictably – in a running series of gun battles on the streets of Budapest in November 1956.  I enjoyed it but I suspect I have a niche taste here.  To be avoided, I think, is Jonathan Wilson’s Streltsov, which is a fictional take on a real Moscow football hero of the 1950s and 60s.  On one level, it’s an interesting attempt to try to put some colour into the history of football (Wilson’s more usual gig, with books like Angels With Dirty Faces and Inverting the Pyramid), and with the football/Soviet Russia connection, you’d think this sits right on my Venn overlap sweet spot.  The problem is, Streltsov spent five years in prison for rape and an awful lot of this book is basically a did he/didn’t he (the evidence from the case has long been contested) and it all feels a bit gross, frankly.

A mishmash of Asian stuff I read Before Going on Holiday

I read somewhere that Suon Sorin’s A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land: A Novel of Sihanouk’s Cambodia, written in the early 1960s was some kind of Khmer classic, so I figured what the hell?  But actually it’s one-dimensional agitprop, with the last ten pages literally given over to the main character attending the Sangkum party congress and voting on many excellent new policies that would modernize the country and purge it of its rentier class.  Avoid.  In my desperation to find some literature about the Philippines (there’s way less than you’d think), I ended up buying Patron Saints of Nothing without realizing it was a YA Novel: (it took me about 15 pages to realize but since I’m a completist a read it anyway…not terrible for the genre).   But eventually I landed on Ilustrado: A Novel, by Miguel Syjuco, which ended up pretty high on my list for the year, particularly after the amazing head-fake in the last couple of pages.  I’m not sure if you would call this an unreliable narrator novel, but the mix of different POVs from a single character at different points in his life, mixed with snippets of fake-fiction and interviews from/with the author whose life story the protagonist is trying to capture keeps you on your toes.  You can probably read it without knowing much Filipino history, but a quick read of articles on the real Ilustrados from the Filipino revolution wouldn’t go amiss.

Middling Books From Great Authors

If there was a theme this year it was that I read a lot of books from my favourite writers that were a ways off their best.  Emily St. John’s Sea of Tranquility was interesting, and weirdly echoed some bits of Hervé Le Tellier’s Anomaly, but was not as compelling as The Glass Hotel (with which it shares some characters without actually being a sequel).  Yan Lianke’s Hard Like Water tries to do for the Cultural Revolution what The Four Books did for the Great Leap Forward but it’s not quite at the same level (and in any case, neither book is as good as his full-on magical realism escapades, Lenin’s Kisses or The Explosion Chronicles, to my mind the most interesting stuff out of China in the last two decades).  Its a similar story with Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s Songs From the Flames – a searing series of lightly connected short stories about the history of Colombia, but not reaching the heights of, say The Sound of Things Falling; and also with Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (the female narrator is not nearly as fun to listen to as the one in the Outline series), or Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart.

Then there Ian MacEwan’s Lessons, yet another of his tales which manages to both a) ruminate on how the course of one’s life can be irrevocably altered by short events and b) fix a single life amongst the great events of the later twentieth/early twenty-first century.  It’s not so much that it’s a bad book, but that MacEwan has been over this ground a lot and doesn’t have much new to offer in this space.  Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, in a weird sort of way, actually does the same thing – resurrecting a number of children killed in a V-2 attack on East End London in 1944 and following them through their lives (intersecting MacEwan’s trajectory in some ways, though they are of different social background) and it’s simply a better book than Lessons, perhaps because by spreading across five protagonists instead of just one, you get a better sense of the full flavour of the times.  Still, Lessons is a lower bar than Spufford’s earlier works such as Golden Hill and especially Red Plenty and having expected something closer to those two, I still found this one wanting. 

And that’s the thing about all of these books: objectively, none of them are bad and some of them are quite entertaining.  But implicitly I guess I grade authors on a curve based on their previous.  

Great Stuff

Ok, so now we are closing in on the good stuff.  I finally got around to reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (as prep for a trip to Los Angeles that I did not end up taking), which – let me stress – is in no way a literary classic, but is a hoot nonetheless if for nothing else than the mid-40s west coast slang.  Domenico Starnone’s Trust is about love, secrets and time, and it will haunt you for days (also: this one is short and snappy – good for a middling-length airplane flight).  Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle maybe lays it on a little thick with the intergenerational symbolism, but the twin tales of an Amelia Earhart-esque flier in the 1920s and 1930s and the present-day actress trying to navigate her own way around the world of Hollywood is still pretty great.  The 2021 Booker Prize Winner, The Promise, by Damon Galgut, resembles the MacEwan/Spufford books in that it’s a family history told in episodes (family funerals in this case) that happen to connect with the life of a nation, only in this case it is South Africa.  No sugarcoating this: it is a harsh read about a harsh country. But the story-telling is inventive, and the theme of the book – Justice, at various scales – is an eternal one, so it’s deserving of your time.

And finally, there was the 2020 prix Goncourt winner, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier which tells the story of an Air France and its crew which mysteriously lands twice at JFK, with identical crew and passengers, several months apart.  Cue a lot of philosophizing about both human nature (can someone essentially cloned mid-life be friends with themselves?) and the nature of the universe (is this not definitive proof we are in a simulation?).  I was a bit surprised by the tone of the book – it’s feels less like a literary prize winner and more like an above-average Netflix movie (basically, imagine the Netflix show Manifest only with about another 50 IQ points).  And the ending…well, it’s very French, politically.  But maybe no worse for that.

(I know I have covered them already, but you can add Straight Man and Illustrado to this list of above-average books for the year)

Top Book

After all that, one book stood head and shoulders above the others, and that was Laurent Binet’s Civilizations, which is a fantastic tail which reverses the story of Pizarro and Atahualpa: in this case, it is Atahualpa who makes it to Spain, takes advantage of dynastic and religious intrigue (it is the early days of the Reformation, after all) and captures Charles the Fifth to take control of the Holy Roman Empire.  You will probably get a little bit more out of this novel if you know a little bit of Incan and Early Modern European history, but I think it probably stands up pretty well, regardless.  An interesting thought experiment, well-conducted. 

Anyways, that’s it.  Read Binet. Always read Binet (The Seventh Function of Language was also excellent, and HHhH was pretty good, too).

Happy 2023.

More on Getting to 1500

Most of the people who have asked me about my mega-reading habits want to know what kinds of tips I have for anyone who wants to try something similar (yes such people do exist).  I have no idea if what worked for me will work for others, but I think I can give you some insight on the things that made it possible for me to get to 1500 books in eight years.

1. Read More Fiction.  I don’t know about y’all but I read fiction about 50% faster than non-fiction.  Information just flows from the page to the brain faster with fiction than it does with non-fiction.  Over my eight years about 25% of my reading was fiction.  I might have been able to finish my 1500 faster had I read more fiction: my problem was finding fiction I actually liked.

2. Read deeper: A lot of reading faster comes down to knowing at least something about the subject matter at hand.  That is to say, if you read deeply on a subject, you’re going to get faster at reading on that subject.  Over the past five years, I’ve read a couple of hundred books on higher education, probably half of which have been on American higher education.  There’s A LOT of overlap.  Just last weekend I finished a book on this subject and quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t a particularly deep book, I’d already read the authors’ previous book on a very similar subject and so I knew a lot of what they were going to say.  Deep reading makes fast reading easier.

I have a few areas where I have read really deeply over the past few years: Chinese history post-45.  US Civil Rights 1960s – onwards.  Russian history 1985-2000.  American higher education.  Every time I read a new book in any of these areas, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I know 50% of the content already and so I am really only reading for the other 50%.  That cuts reading time pretty significantly.

3. Read to a Plan: What follows from the first two points is this: organize your reading.  Plan it in advance.  Cluster books together on the same topic so you get “economies of scale”.  Say next month you want to read 15 books: make ten of them about a single subject.  Say I wanted to make that subject Italy: I’d probably pick up a couple of regional histories (say, about Sicily), a biography or two (Garibaldi?  Cavour?), maybe something about politics and economics, something on reunification…you get the idea.  Then I’d add some two or three works of Italian fiction (Ferrante?  Starnone?)  And then I’d throw in four or five books that have nothing to do with Italy, some sci-fi maybe or a couple of books on American or Canadian history.  It’s all for the sole purpose of variety and not getting bogged down. 

Another reason to read to a plan is that it gives you some accountability.  If you want to read a hundred books a year, write down which two books you want to read for each of the next five weeks.  If you do that, you’ll always know if/when you’re behind.  It will nag at you.  You will have goals to get back on track.

I think the trick here to some extent is finding ways to re-inforce your reading with other kinds of experiences.  I travel a lot internationally, so I tend to make my reading revolve around my travels (more generally, I tend to organize my reading geographically, a little like Daunt Books in London does).  Next month I’m heading to Taiwan and the Philippines, so I’m making it a point to pick out literature and history books about those two countries (there is remarkably little Filipino history available in English in North America).  I’m taking Little Miss Sumo to Japan in March, so I’m stockpiling books about Japan to read before I get there (if the books are physical) and during my trip (kindle).  But it doesn’t need to be travel – I could imagine doing it around new movies that are coming out, for instance. 

4. Read Simultaneously: One of the ways I keep up a pace is to have more than one book going simultaneously.  Again, it’s about variety and not getting stuck.  If the book you’re reading is slow or a bit irritating or whatever – switch books.  If the mind wanders – switch books.  I nearly always have between two and four books going at the same time for that reason.  And if there’s a book that is just bogging you down…leave it for a month or two.  Or longer.  Towards the end of my 1500, I had around ten unfinished books (for weird completionist reasons I made myself finish them all before hitting my target even though I could have hit 1500 faster had I not done that). 

5. Read Longer.  No way around it:  to read a lot of books you need to spend a lot of time reading.   I have to say that COVID – which affected my business pretty badly – gave me a lot of time to read (I read 259 books in 2020) and was a big factor in getting me to my goal two years ahead of schedule.   I wouldn’t recommend trying this kind of thing if you have a lot of priorities competing for your time.

But there’s another question which I think is important, one people don’t actually ask me, perhaps because they are too polite.  And that question is: should one want to read this much?  And after a lot of reflection, I think I would say no.

On the whole, I am pretty happy to have read deeply in the areas where I read really deeply.  And I am happy to have discovered a number of fiction writers whose works I will no doubt follow for the rest of my life.  But I’d say probably a third of the books I read were not just very good and 500 bad books is a lot of time wasted.  (Of course it’s hard to know in advance which books are going to suck – maybe it’s a cost of doing business?  I don’t know).  I wish I’d found a way to read specific literatures more deeply and left the rest of it alone. 

I mean, 500 books is probably 2000 hours.  That’s time I could have used to do a lot of other stuff.  Say, learn a new language or two.  And I think that’s what I’m going to do next.  See if I can learn Japanese and Spanish, say.   That might be hard: I suspect the required work rhythm is quite different than it is for reading and I might find it quite hard to get into.  But I need a new challenge and I think this might be it.

1500.

In January 2015, in the middle of a terrible bout of bronchitis, I set myself the challenge of reading 1500 books in 10 years dating back to the start of that year. Today, 7 years and 319 days later, as I closed he cover (metaphorically – I’m mostly a kindle reader) on Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus, I’m done.

At some point soon I will probably write something about more introspective about all this, but for now:

354 works of fiction and 1146 of non-fiction. 468,000 pages (Avg book = 312 pages), Shortest : Machiavelli’s Castruccio Castracani (48 pages). Longest: Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1298 pages)

What did I actually learn?  Well, I have a much better grasp of higher education outside the anglosphere than I used to. I think I kind of get American history now.  I can’t say I “get” Chinese history/politics but I have a pretty decent understanding of at least the chronology and main figures from about 1850 onwards.  I read a fair bit on Japan and India, and on Latin America and Africa too (though not any single country in particular).  I tried to read more about First Nations’ history – though to be honest I find books from the American side of the border much more interesting than the ones from up here.  

As for the more meta thing – what did I learn about meeting motivated reading goals and reading faster? Well, I am not sure anything here will apply to anyone but me but the main trick I discovered was to read a lot of books about a similar theme at the same time.  So, for instance, I might decide that a given February would be “China month”, in which case something like two-thirds or three-quaters of the books I read would be focused on China. The concentration of books on one subject meant there was overlap in topics and I could therefore skim a bit. But at the same time, I couldn’t *only* read books on a single topic or I would go nuts – the bibliophile equivalent of protein poisoning, I guess – so I had to keep some other stuff in there too. Eventually you read enough books on a topic – higher education for example, which accounted for a little under 15% of my reading – that there can be whole sections of a book where you know what the author’s going to say, and it;s mainly a matter of hunting for the bits text that are generally new (to you). (or me). (whatever).

Another trick I guess would be: if the book is ponderous, put it down and start another book. Don’t set it aside completely – I only did that once, with Sir Richard Burton’s original English translation of The Arabian Nights (I will read this eventually, but in a modern translation – the prose in the Burton version is just absurd). But temporarily, when you’re getting bogged down, it’s best to just find something fresh and fun and quick and then come back to the more difficult piece. I abused that tactic quite a lot in the last few months – there was a point this spring where I think I had 10 unfinished books lying around (Doniger’s was certainly one of them – it’s not a bad book, but it’s hard to get into without a much more detailed knowledge of Indian mythology than I possess), but I made a point to get them all done before the end. No loose ends.

Anyways, it’s done. Am considering taking up learning languages next. A language a year? Would that work? Not sure I have the temperament to stick to that. I think it would require me to give up reading the way I do and not sure I can do that. We’ll see.

Year in Non-fiction 2021

Part 2 of the re-wind on my 2021 reading list.  Part 1, which dealt with fiction, you can find here.  This one is about non-fiction.  I mentally shelve things geographically, kind of like Daunt Books, so I’ll mostly explain my year that way

North America

I read almost nothing about Canada this year: just Emmett MacFarlane’s new book Constitutional Pariah: Senate Reform and the Future of Parliament and a 50-year old treatise on the Creditiste movement, The Dynamics of Right-Wing Protest: A political Analysis of Social Credit in Quebec by Michael Stein.  The first, about the Trudeau government’s changes to the Senate, was excellent – just everything a political science book should be: short, measured, low on theory and a good sense of history.  Two big thumbs up.  The latter is dated and in some senses irrelevant, but it is interesting background for thinking about alt-right anti-vax nutbar-ishness (and, to a certain extent the CAQ as well). 

I read two books on Indigenous peoples in North America this year.  The first was Atlas of Indian Nations, which is kind of an encyclopedia, so it’s not really a great read, but it did give me a much better sense of the geography of different First Nations groupings than I used to have, and so for that reason I appreciated it.  The second was Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America which is pretty cool in the sense that it gives a relatively unbroken diplomatic history of the Anishnaabe peoples from contact through to the 19^th century.  What’s really quite amazing in some ways is how powerful these nations seemed to be right up until the moment when they just suddenly lost the demographic battle with the settlers.  It really does seem to have been like a flick of a switch just after the War of 1812 (the “flick” from was very similar with the Comanches and the Sioux right after the Civil War).  Anyways, an illuminating read, from a very continental (rather than a Canadian or American) perspective.

Another important continental read this year was Alan Talyor’s American Republics: A Continental History 1789-1850.  As with all of Taylor’s work, it’s excellent – by setting American history into a broader continental context which includes Canada the Caribbean and Mexico, it not only puts American exceptionalism into sharp relief, but also renders some aspects of American policy much more legible (it’s hard to write about the antebellum south without a good sense of what happened during Haiti’s revolution).  I recommend this book to everyone.   

By accident, I ended up reading two books about mid-century applied sociology and its effects on the way: Jill Lepore’s If/Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future and Diving Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation by Liza Featherstone.  Both books detail – among other things – the development of social sciences in the mid-twentieth century as they were applied to business and mass marketing.  Lepore’s is the better book of the two, but they are both kind of fun, and I particularly appreciated the bits in Featherstone book which related to Mad Men (apparently the German woman “from research” who was discarded after the pilot episode was a real person).

In the US, I am increasingly reading state and civic histories, which I find in many ways more illuminating than attempted national sweeps.  Mike Davis’s 1990 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, is pretty illuminating in many respects about urban California history, if you can get past the droning about neoliberalism.  David Hill’s The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob and the Rose and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice is the story of how a small town in Arkansas became, for a brief period in the 30s and 40s, a Southern version of Atlantic City, replete with it’s own outposts of the New York Mob (a combination of bible-belt politics and Bugsey Segal’s efforts in Las Vegas eventually put the place out of business).  It’s OK, but not great.  Not badly written or anything, but the underlying story just isn’t that compelling.  Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, a history of St. Louis and its environs, is better, and in particular a useful reminder that property dispossession and legal control over land was a key tactic in whites’ battles against both First Nations and Blacks over the decades.  And finally, there was the utterly charming A Libertarian Runs Into a Bear: the Utopian plot to Liberate an American Town, the story of a small town in New Hampshire which was targeted for take-over by Libertarians, many of whom moved there, tried to take control of the town council and got rid of as many rules and taxes as they could.  They had mixed success politically, but what success they had was in preventing town services from being properly funded.  Predictably, this libertarian experiment got mugged by reality – among other ways in the form of an invasion of bears which the incomes-starved city government was powerless to control.

The last two books, finally, dealt with two key episodes from the Jim Crow era: Scott Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 and David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.  The first was ok: I understand that Ellsworth has since done more work since this, and maybe his later books would have been a better bet.  But Zucchino’s book is a genuine masterpiece; a detailed account of how a group of white southern Democrats violently overthrew the North Carolina city’s fusionist biracial administration in a violent coup d’etat and how literally no one anywhere else in the United States lifted a finger to stop it.  This was in some ways the absolute pinnacle of White Supremacy in the United States and yet until a couple of decades was largely ignored in American histories (even Howard Zinn passed over it in silence apart from a reference made by a Black soldier in the Philippines).  If you’re in the mood to get angry, this one’s for you.

Asia

I read a lot of Asian history this year largely because Little Miss Sumo wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons, and so I decided to create a world based on late-16^th century East Asia, with the campaign centred on Okinawa (because, naively, I thought COVID might be over by now and we’d be able to go to and take in the islands along with a Basho).  In that vein I read Okinawa: The History of an Island People by George Kerr and Mistsugu Sakihara, The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia by Mamoru Akamine and Robert Huey and Maritime Ryukyu 1050-1650 by Gregory Smits.  Probably none of you have any interest in any of these because they are so niche, but the Smits book hits the good but short nexus that might make it interesting to some.  On Taiwan, I read Taiwan: A New History (edited by Murray A. Rubinstein), which is a collection of scholarly articles and as such is a bit of a mixed bag (also Formosan Odyssey by John Grant Ross, which is definitely not scholarly but still occasionally fun.  Luis H. Franca’s A History of the Philippines: from Indios Bravos to Filipinos was kind of meh as far as the Spanish period was concerned but the American period was covered well.  Finally, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute by David Kang is a pretty good synthesis of how international relations worked in the region from about 1300-1800 (answer: don’t bring those Westphalian ideas ‘round this hegemon/periphery neighbourhood).  It’s probably better with some background in regional history, but it’s another one of those good, short books which might make it a good entrée into the area, too.

On China I read a half-dozen books, of which the weakest was China & the Future of Globalization: The Political Economy of China’s Rise by Grzegorz W Kolodko (not exactly wrong but massively irritating in style).  City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong by Antony Dapiran is one of those books that got completely overtaken by events: it’s a decent street-view of what happened up to 2019, but of course given what happened in 2020 (and since) it’s a bit of a footnote. Desmond Shum’s  Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption and Vengeance in Today’s China is a very interesting behind-the-scenes view of how elite Communist society works.  Shum was a member of that elite, and wed to an inveterate social climber, and in this way they gained the connections that allowed them to build a business empire.  But eventually, they fell victim to factional politics – the couple split, Shum left the country in fear of his life, while his wife, mistakenly thinking she had enough guanxi to make it through stayed and was “disappeared”.  Obviously a motivated take, but no less interesting for that.

I have really come to appreciate Harvard’s 6-volume series on the History of Imperial China.  It’s one of those things for which you need a bit of background to really get (for a single volume it is hard to be John Keay’s China: A History), but they are very rewarding if you want to go that one layer deeper.  This year I read Timothy Brook’s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (see?  There’s that D &D inspired 16^th Century focus), and found it to be a nice little volume.  The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21^st Century by Bruce J. Dickson is a pretty good examination of how the Chinese communist party both reacts to and attempts to shape public opinion. 

But the China book of the year, surely, is The Invention of China by Bill Hayton.  First, it’s a very good book about how the western concept of nationalism took root in China (a difficult graft at first because back in the day, China thought of itself as a multi-national country: as late as 1928 the Nationalist government’s flag was a five-striped flag representing the five “races” of China – Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan).  But it’s also a very good intellectual history of how Communist China – not unlike Western nations – has wildly twisted its pluralistic history to bolster the concept of a single, unified Han nation-state.  If you have any interest at all in China, this one is well worth your time, I think.

Movingover to Japan (remember, I was going there, right?  Like, in November.  Maybe next year.).  I finally got around to reading Samuel Hawley’s  The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China, which is a decent history of a momentous if little-known (outside of Korea) conflict.  Could have done fewer pages, but whatever.  Science, Technology and Society in Contemporary Japan by Morris Low was an interesting (to me) look at how the country’s science/innovation system evolved in the latter half of the century.  It’s not a page-turner or anything, but I wish more countries had books like this. 

Two books on modern Japan which deserve to be read together are Robert Whiting’s memoir Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys…and Baseball and Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt.  Whiting is most famous for his books on Japanese baseball (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, and The Meaning of Ichiro) and a bit for the Tokyo noir of the 50s and 60s by (Tokyo Underworld), and this book is really a record of his time in the city from his time as a GI in the 50s to today, and reflections on how it has evolved and changed.  Alt’s book covers a roughly similar time period in Japanese popular culture, but adds focus on how Japan altered the rest of the world, too.  There was also Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City by Anna Sherman, which I found a bit slow in comparison (I suppose that was probably the point, but while I get that slowness is a thing in Japan, it just doesn’t compute for me with respect to Tokyo itself).

The rest of the continent got short shrift, with only two books.  Liban 2019: Chronique de La Revolte, Alice Boustany Djermakian is an interesting day-by day account of the year (and a little bit into 2020).  It seems hard to remember now, but the country briefly seemed on the brink of a popular revolt in 2019 in response to that country’s economic collapse.  Two years, COVID, and a Halifax-style style explosion later, it seems amazing that there was ever a moment of hope in this beautiful but sad little country.  And then there was Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India by K.S. Komireddi, which is pretty much the definitive take on what an asshole Narendra Modi is, and why India’s religious bullies are gradually turning the place into the mirror-image of Pakistan.

Europe

I stayed mostly clear of Europe this year.  The books I did were either actively bad (Paul Preston A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain 1874-2018 Paul Preston), deeply idiosyncratic (The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom by Rachel Lene Anderson and Tomas Bjorkman), genuinely batshit crazy (Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny by Wladimir Velminski) or very high on the anorak scale (Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire).   Anderson and Bjorkman have a pet theory about how 19^th century conceptions of Bildung closely mirror modern concepts of developmental psychology, and so by dint of having incorporated these concepts into folk schools in the 19^th century, Denmark, Sweden and Norway just have more Bildung in their DNA and that’s why they are so cool.   Reading it provokes equal measures of insight and eye-rolling, basically.  The Velminski book is a quick (90 pages) re-counting of Soviet theories on things like brainwaves and telepathy and focuses on a national broadcast in late 1989 in which the regime seems to have thought it could hypnotize the country into thinking more positive thoughts as revolutions started blowing through all of Eastern Europe.  As for the Corbyn book….well, it is not bad, but at the same time it is far more than anyone really needs to know about the man’s shambolic leadership style (there is an entire chapter about the rise and fall of one of his executive assistants, for instance). 

One moderatelyinteresting book was A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and Ghosts of the Past in Post-War II Germany by Monica Black.  It’s an interesting set of tales about the rise of faith-healers and concern with the supernatural in the British and American Zones in the late 1940s, and while I recommend it as an interesting entry into the rapidly-growing field of “how the hell did Europe actually recover from barbarism, anyway?” books, but I thought the connections drawn with national feelings of collective guilt/trauma were speculative at best, and cod-psychology at worst.  Meanwhile, Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture, by Elizabeth Buetnner, was my book of the year in this sub-field.  A comparative examination of how British, French, Portuguese, Dutch and Belgian national identities changes as they each retreated from their colonies after the war, it is both magisterial and deeply thought-provoking. 

Rest of the World

This is the left-over pile, geographically if not in terms of quality.  Only one book on Latin America this year, William John Green’s Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism and Popular Mobilization in Colombia, which was ok but not one for beginners.  (Actually, the problem with Colombia is that there is no great book for beginners even though – because? – it is in many ways the most interesting and complex country on the continent).  Also one from down under: Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native by Michael King.  This one is kind of fascinating, particularly from a Canadian POV.  King, who died about 15 years ago, was a popular historian, but the history he was most interested in chronicling was that of the Maori, for which he was sometimes feted and sometimes viewed with suspicion by that community.  What I found interesting about this book, from a Canadian POV, is how much weaker Canadian settle engagement with Indigenous cultures has been.  Partly, I think it is because Maori culture, by virtue of history and geography, is more of a unified entity than is the case among Canadian First Nations, and hence probably easier to document and thus for an outside public to grasp.  But also, I don’t think there really is a Canadian settler equivalent to Michael King who made the effort to try to understand and translate the history and culture to the rest of the country.

In Africa, I read two books about Kenya: Daniel Branch’s Kenya: Between Hope and Despair 1963-2011 and Kenya’s History That is Not Taught in School Jeff Katieno and Maurice Amutabi.  The first is a pretty straight-up political history which is clear, moderately concise, but fairly dutiful.  The latter…is not.   It’s sort of a set of vignettes purporting to tell the stories behind the stories.  I have no real way to evaluate any of the claims in it, but it’s interesting nevertheless to see what claims are actually made and I wish books like this were available for more countries in Africa.

There were two absolute stand-out books from Africa this year.  The first was Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil by Mark Leopold, which was freaking excellent.  It’s a biography, sort of, but it’s also a sort of work in applied historiography, constantly interrogating the many sources of information on the man, many of them deeply compromised.  What emerges is a quite different figure from the usual caricature.  Brutal, yes, but not uniquely so; highly cunning and Machiavellian and yet at the same time not completely in control of armed forces he purported to command (and whose free-lance operations were the source of so much terror and corruption during his period in power).  The other was Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad about the Kagame regime and its opponents in Rwanda.  It won’t (and shouldn’t) make you rethink what you know about the genocide there, but it absolutely should make you rethink what you believe about the government which came to power in its aftermath.  Not as good as her book on Eritrea (I Didn’t Do It For You, which might be the best piece of Western journalism ever on modern Africa) but it’s a strong second-place.

Economic and Political Thought

I spent a lot of time perusing some pretty pedestrian academic stuff on economic development, which I won’t get into here.  Windows of Opportunity: How Nations Create Wealth by David Sansbury, caught some positive attention though for the life of me I can’t figure out why as there’s nothing especially interesting there.  Embedded Autonomy: States & Industrial Transformation by Peter B. Evans wsa an unexpected treasure; though now about three decades old it isa very intelligent read on how development states actually develop.  Basically: when the state is both embedded in civil society/economy and is of a rational-legal-Weberian type, then you’ve really got something, but if it is only one of those, you either get clientelism like Indonesia or an overloaded state system like India’s.  Good read for academic historians. 

But as far as economics and innovation go, there is only one possible winner here: Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World by Dan Breznitz.  The first 130 pages or so are really the only thing people need to read about innovation (the last 90 pages or so are almost a different work entirely, seems like the publisher made him tack on extra words to make the book longer).  Seriously, this is the bomb.  Almost everything else on the subject is pretty much nonsense.

Meanwhile: there has been a lot of stuff out over the last few years agonizing about the evils of meritocracy in America.  These are somewhat hard to take seriously, because meritocracy is usually defined as “whatever makes up the ruling class of the United States right now”, which is absurd because there is a fair bit of plutarchy involved there as well.  The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel is perhaps the most strident of these tirades, although at the end of the day he is not saying much other than “perhaps rewards need to be spread more widely than they are now and the path to those rewards should be not require attendance at expensive, exclusive private universities”.  Which, you know, is not exactly an argument against meritocracy per se.

And I definitely think everyone who tosses around words like meritocracy in the American context – and particularly those that use it in conjunction with that other awful word (neoliberal) need to see things from a more global context.  They could read Meritocracy and its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China by Zachary M. Howlett to see how it works in China, for instance.  And then they might reflect that it’s not so bad in the US after all. Or they could read The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Woolridge.  Some of what is in here is unnecessarily tendentious (particularly around “wokeness” and the UK school system), but his basic point – that the practical alternative to meritocracy is oligarchy, not some classless utopia – is worth heeding.

The title of Gabriel Winant’s The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America hides the fact that this is unabashedly a labour history, and specifically a labour history of Pittsburgh.  But once you re-adjust your expectations, this is a pretty interesting post-war history of the City of Bridges, chronicling its evolution from a steeltown in the 1950s to a heathcare management town in the 1990s.   I read James Ball’s The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside the Shadow System That Shapes the Internet at the height of my illness last winter so I remember very little about it other than it was a short and useful overview of how the internet was managed.  Andrew Potter’s pamphlet-ish On Decline: Stagnation, Nostaligia and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever was a good series of short essays on why the modern world seems to have trouble coming to grips with complexity and simply getting anything done.  I am not sure the overall argument he makes quite holds together (for one thing, the “we” that he talks about as having these difficulties leading to stagnation is a bit slippery – is it “Canada”?  “the west”?  “liberals”?), but short and lively pamphlets probably come at the expense of some of that kind of clarity.

One of themost intriguing books I read this year was Ashley Mears’ Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.  Mears is an associate professor at Boston University and also a former fashion model.  This book is her story of hanging out in the exclusive clubs in Manhattan and South Breach, as well as the yacht scene of the Riviera, and looking at the economics of it all: how the bars make money, how there always happen to be so many young thin women around (answer: there are dudes – who are not quite pimps because it’s not quite sex work – who recruit dozens of young women simply to be present and create a vibe).  As a work of ethnography it is quite something.  Would love to have read the IBR submission on this one.

Sports

For reasons I now forget, I decided to read more sports books this year.  It was a mixed bag.  Blood and Circuses: Football and the Fight for Europe’s Rebel Republics by Robert O’Connor was mildly interesting but also kind of formulaic.  Go to some conflict-ridden place (Kosovo, Moldava, Abkhazia, etc).  Note how shitty the football is.  Find people to describe an earlier golden age.   Find other people who will explain why this is never coming back.  Admire the few people who are trying anyway.  Repeat.  Meh.  Devon Rowcliffe’s Who Ate All the Squid: Football Adventures in South Korea is also formulaic in the sense that it’s a follow-one-team-for-one-year-and-learn-about-sport-and-society-in-another-country yarn which I think originates with Tim Parks’ A Season With Verona.  It’s interesting just because Asian football is run on such a different basis than European football (much more corporate involvement), but weirdly, this book published in 2020 recounts Rowcliffe’s wanderings in 2003 following a team which no longer exists, which more or less precludes anyone going from this book to deep anorank-ism for the K-League.  DeRo: My Life is a couple of hours of my life I will never get back (big fan of the man, and liked the last chapter where he spoke about the difficulties of adjusting to life after football, but a lot of this was pretty overbearing).

The Away Leg: XI Football Stories on the Road, edited by Steve Menary was a cute little concept book: 11 stories from different football writers around the globe, all about away matches, to tide us over because none of us could go to matches during COVID.  As you’d expect, it was a mixed bag: James Montague following the Lebanese team to North Koreas was the best; the worst was from some American dude in Jerusalem who decided to follow Beitar Jerusalem and then is shocked when it turns out their fans are all racist shits (I mean, dude, google is right there).   The Black Man In Brazilian Soccer by journalist Mario Filho (the Maracana is officially named after him), is not so much a broad sociological take on race and football as it is a series of stories about the earliest black stars of Brazilian football (mainly Rioca football, actually).  You will learn as much about the social life in Rio in the early part of the twentieth century as anything else.  Ryan Hubbard’s From Partition to Solidarity: the first 100 years of Polish Football by Ryan Hubbard has its moments – how minority nations under the Austrian empire tried to organize their own internationals and briefly had their own alternative to FIFA, how a national league was created out of three different systems in 1920, how communist-era teams paid their players – but it all gets lost under a welter of not-very-interesting match descriptions.  I’d avoid this one.

The soccer book of the year, though, is definitely Simon Kuper’s The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making – and Unmaking – of the World’s Greatest Club.  It’s wonderful because it’s the opposite of an insta-book; Kuper has had a working relationship with the club for around 25 years, and he has a deep understanding of the club and how it works.  I liked it mostly because it isn’t a club history (though it is partially that) or a player bio (though it is partially that, of Messi), or a tactical history (again, partially), but a mix of all of those things, along with, interestingly, a quite thorough examination of the club’s politics and internal dynamics, fed by about 30 years-worth of Kuper’s interviews of people at the club.  Basically, it’s an attempt to answer the question of whether Barcelona really is “mes que un club”. The answer, essentially, is that if it ever was, it was about four things – Cruyff, Catalonia, La Masia and UNICEF – and it’s not clear that any of these still define the institution (*maybe* Catalonia still does, but FCB is a lot further from the radical edge of Catalonian politics than it used to be).  Two big thumbs up.

On basketball, I read Matthew Goodman’s The City Game: Triumph, Scandal and a Legendary Basketball Team, about the legendary CUNY teams from the early 1950s, how they succumbed to point-shaving and were discovered (and yes, Bobby Bacala’s eulogy for Carmine Lupertazzi – “he was a great man!  He invented point shaving!” went through my head the entire book).  It was OK, but I founf it hard to drive up much interest in a team I had never seen (or heard much of).  Loose Balls: the Short Wild Life of the American Basketball Association by Terry Pluto, on the other hand, was a riot.  It’s an oral history, which has some limitations, and it’s probably about a hundred pages too long, but it makes you realize how insane second-tier pro-sports was in the 60s and 1970s.  Semi-Pro was only semi-fictional.  And speaking of gong show leagues, End Zones and Border Wars by Ed Willes is a history of the Canadian Football League’s expansion into the United States.  This is what you call very light entertainment.

Finally there was The Way of Salt: Understanding Japan and Sumo by Ash Warren.  Suffice to say that while there are very few works explaining sump in English, this still wouldn’t be the one I’d recommend.  (Try Discover Sumo by Hideo Yamaki, a former yobidashi, it’s very good)

Miscellaneous

I read a lot of business books this year – some to try to work out client problems and some to work out my own.  I’m Sorry I Broke Your Company: When Management Consultants are the Problem, Not the Solution, a de-bunking of some long-held management theories about how to be a high-performing by Karen Phelan is definitely worth a read if you’re in the consulting business.  And probably a re-read every couple of years if you yourself are a manager (central thesis: being good to your employees and investing in them is nearly always the right solution).   Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson and Bill Breen was pretty so-so.  Yes, Lego had a near death experience and came back from it, but as told in this book it’s actually hard to see that there really was a “back-from-the-brink” strategy – they threw a bunch of stuff at the wall and some of it worked.  Meh.

I know this is going to sound strange, but the two most valuable books for my business thinking were actually a pair of Taschen books by the Bjarke Ingells Group: Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, and Hot to Cold: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation.  Basically, they reminded me of an old conviction I had that higher education was badly deficient in being able to communicate visually in an effective manner and convinced me that I needed to think more about the visual communication aspects of my own business (I hired a wonderful designer and business has been very good since then).   

Let’s see, what else?  My friend Dan Munro recommended The Life of Castruccio Castracani by Nicolo Machiavelli, which is a short and interesting meditation on Fortune and Virtue (I understand there are lots of layers I probably didn’t get because my understanding of renaissance Tuscany isn’t very good).  I didn’t enjoy Audrey Watters Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning as much as I expected.  That’s not because it’s a bad book – it’s actually a pretty good one (again deep into the mid-20^th century applied social sciences stuff); I just had too-high expectations that Watters would carry the subject forward to the present day rather than just using 60 year-old examples as a parable about today’s frothy claims about personalized learning (to be clear: it’s a good book, I’m the one with misaligned expectations). 

The two top books in this category were pretty easy to name.  One was Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford Astra Zeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green.  It’s not just an engrossing explanations of how vaccines are actually produced, it’s actually a *very* interesting look at how the funding structures underlying academic science shape the way science itself is constructed.      The other was A New History of Early Christianity by Charles Freeman.  I’ve always had an interest in the early church and how it shifted from a ragtag group of believers, persisted through persecution and schism and then eventually evolved into the Roman empire’s state religion, and this might be the most accessible short account of that transition ever written.  It’s brilliant.

So, my quick top ten:

American Republics: A Continental History 1789-1850 by Alan Taylor

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford Astra Zeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green 

Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit by Ashley Mears

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making – and Unmaking – of the World’s Greatest Club by Simon Kuper

Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil by Mark Leopold

The Invention of China by Bill Hayton

A New History of Early Christianity by Charles Freeman

Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World by Dan Breznitz

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

See you all next year.

Year in Fiction 2021

Hi all.  Have been hesitating to write this post, because overall it was a pretty crap year in reading, for three reasons.

1. I was quite ill February-April (as in visually impaired and quite enjoying morphine ill) and then super-busy at work after August and so my pace fell off, back down to 150 books or so, well below where I’ve been for the last few years.
2. I read a lot for work – meaning around higher education, science and technology, etc.  I have written a bit about my favourites in those areas in my regular blog if anyone cares.  But that pushed out some other types of reading.
3. The proportion of either non-fiction or fiction reading this year that was any good was pretty low.  Genuinely, I think I’ve got to the point where I’ve read most of the good stuff in the areas I care about, and am now sort of reading second-tier books to fill around the interesting stuff. 

As a result, this list is shorter than usual.  I’ll do fiction in this document, then non-fiction in the next.  Ready?  Let’s go.

Let’s start with the sci-fi, because I read a lot of it. 

Sci-Fi

Some of what I read were old favourites from my youth: the first two volumes of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series because Little Miss Sumo decided they were funny (though tbh, they were not nearly as well-written as I remembered), as well as Stormbringer, the final book of Michael Moorcock’s Elric series because she was getting into Dungeons and Dragons (this was much shlockier than I remembered, and I remembered it as shlock to begin with). 

I read Frank Herbert’s Dune for the first time because of the movie, and look, I can sort of see why it became a smash in the 70s, but it feels hugely dated to me.  Maybe a wider knowledge of Islam makes it feel less exotic?  Also in the older sci-fi category was C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, a story about various aspects of interstellar colonialism, is similar to Dune in the sense that the world-building in the backstory is a lot more impressive than the realtime plot itself.  Never having actually read any Lovecraft I bought the Lovecraft Compendium, a collection of Cthulu stories from a neat (and cheap!) little series of novella-length books from the publisher Arcturus.  It’s about what you’d expect: early 20^th Century gothic prose, some terrifyingly awful racism, and a truly impressive number of synonyms for “slimy” and “gibbering”.

My reading journal says I read The War of the Maps in January, but I have almost no recollection of it at all, which should tell you something.  Also early in the year I read Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit, which has many of the hallmarks of Ffordish goofiness – it describes UK society after the country’s rabbits collectively had a change in consciousness and acquired reason and speech – without much of the usual panache.  Not a bad book, but not one of his best, either. 

Late in the year I read two novels about climate change: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future and Neil Stephenson’s Termination Shock.  The latter is ok, in the sense the pacing is mostly quick, that Stephenson manages to make geo-engineering kind of accessible, and the plot isn’t too ludicrous or unwieldy (in truth it bears a number of similarities to REAMDE, except the overwrought action scene at the end only takes 60 pages instead of 150, which is a blessing).   And overall, the politics of climate change in Stephenson’s oeuvre are a bit more realistic than those of The Ministry of the Future, which are mostly preposterous.  And God knows it’s more readable.  There are books which are character-led, books that are plot-led, and then there are books in which both character and plot are merely scaffolding on which an author can hang a bunch of pet theories on economics and geo-engineering.  The fact that a couple of these ideas are interesting (I liked the storyline about draining meltwater from the underside of Antarctica’s glaciers) does not really redeem the book as a work of fiction.  Basically, climate change is not really a good hook for fiction.

The best science-fiction I read this year probably were to continuations of series I started last year.  The first being Ancillary Mercy (third book of Ann Leckie’s “Imperial Radch” trilogy, which on the whole is excellent – a little it Iain Banks-ish, except the Culture isn’t some sort of liberal-democratic blob, but an empire ruled over by a widely-cloned ruler whose shared-conscious bodies eventually declare civil war on one another (complicated but fun).  The other is Children of Time, by Alexander Tchaikovsky.  Last year, I mistakenly read the second book before I read this one, the first.  It’s science-fiction on a very long timescale – millennia, in fact – and does an interesting job of describing what it’s like to be on a literal ark-ship for millennia, as well as what happens when a rather large ant species develops consciousness and social organization.  Again, complicated but fun.

North American Authors

Malcolm Lowry’s’s Under the Volcano is a good but not that good (top 100 of the 20^th Century?  No.) about the final day of a divorced, drink-sodden English Consul living in a dead-end Mexican town in 1939 whose ex-wife comes to visit him.  Basically, it’s a novel of self-destruction in the tropics, sort of Graham Greene meets-Hunter S. Thompson but without ever losing a 1940s priggishness. 

The main redeeming quality of Don DeLillo’s The Silence was that it was short.   

Jessica Anthony’s Enter the Aardvark, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and Sean Adams’ The Heap are all variants on a quintessentially American style.  I don’t know if there is actually a name for it, but you might call it a form of American Magical Realism, books which exist in a slightly different reality but which are not science-fiction, or in which the fourth wall just gets blown all to hell.  Sometimes, these books can be fun but they’re not serious, if you know what I mean.  They’re beach reading, basically.  They’re all ok, but a certain level, if you’ve read one of these, you’ve read them all.  Enter the Aardvark might get the nod as being the best on a time investment/fun ratio.  But you know, read them, don’t read them, it’s all the same.

I liked Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf, in which the opening “Lo,” has been changed to “Bro”, and the whole thing turned into a meditation on toxic masculinity.  It’s a gimmick, obviously, but a neat one and fortunately the original poem is not long enough that you get bored of the one trick before the end. 

I almost put Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World under sci-fi, because like Lawrence Wright’s book The End of October, it was a book about a global pandemic which was written before COVID but released slightly after it.  Her effort is better than Wright’s in the sense that I think it deals more realistically both with the politics and the psychology of pandemics (Wright’s book posited a disease as transmissible as the flu and as deadly as Ebola, but the restaurants all stayed open), but on the whole, pandemic novels aren’t much better than climate change ones as a genre.  Rate this one as not bad but by no means essential.  (Also, for any Douglas Hall types reading this: Nawaz is married to Derek Webster).

So that leaves Real Life, a campus novel about a gay, black graduate student in biology at a not-at-all-disguised University of Wisconsin which got a lot of praise.  I was 50-50 on this one.  It does a better job than most books in describing the layered nature of slights – not just based on race, gender or sexuality but also simple interpersonal rivalry – that accumulate in relationships in a highly-pressured environment like a major university laboratory.  And I also really appreciated a campus novel that was not about the social sciences/humanities.  But at the same time I didn’t feel particularly moved by the plot so…worth reading but not a favourite.  Finally Arthur Phillips’s The King at the Edge of the World, about a late-16^th century Turkish noble who ends up stranded for decades in Elizabethan England.  I’m a big fan of Phillips and have been ever since Prague came out 20 years ago (The Egyptologist is a big fave, too).  Well-written historical fiction, without getting into Hilary Mantel door-stopper territory.

UK Authors

This is one area in which there is a clear stand-out, and that’s the 2020 Booker winner, Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart.  The story of a child growing up with an alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow is perhaps one of the saddest novels you will ever read – I strongly recommend that you be in a good state of mind before starting this one – but that’s no reason not to read it.  It’s simply excellent and a deserved Booker winner.

After that my list gets a bit thinner.  The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison, got some love for being a deeply-creepy-but-not-quite-horror story about some kind of atavistic squelchy ur-Britons quietly encroaching (returning?) to bits of urban Britain.  You can read it as a comment on Brexit/ethnonationalism if you wish – certainly felt like it to me – but it’s entertaining enough even if you don’t.  The Glass Kingdom, by Lawrence Osborne, is also about decay, only it’s set in a semi-finished condo in a violent Bangkok and the main character is a young American woman on the run with some valuable purloined letters.  Good if you’re travelling in South East Asia, I think, but maybe less so otherwise.

I wanted to like Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill but didn’t.  There are interesting insights into politics and obsession in here, but it just didn’t click for me.  I could see giving the author another go, though.  Sophie Ward’s Love and Other Thought Experiments was (IMHO) a fairly pointless story about lost love and ants living inside one’s brain stem (really).  And Gabriel Krause’s Who They Was is a pretty average “smart kid from the street wastes his potential” story.

Rest of the World

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, by Cho Jam-Noo is billed a Korean feminist novel which went gangbusters in South Korea, but mostly what you learn from it is that Korea has yet to move past second-wave feminism.   Te-Ping Chen’s Land of Big Numbers, which is a series of ten short stories about people struggling to make it in current-day China, is very good as short-story collection goes, and deserves most of the praise it has received.  Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings is almost exactly like her earlier Convenience Store Woman, only with more sexual predation and cannibalism.

Night Prayers, by Colombian novelist Santiago Gamboa, was very much in the style of Juan Gabriel Vasquez (who y’all know I love), without achieving the same kind of literary heights.  Again one of those, not bad, not great entries.  This was quite unlike Mahir Guven’s Older Brother, a novel about being young and Muslim in Paris.  Not surprisingly, the attractions of jihadism are front and centre in this story, and they are handled on the whole very well (much better than they were, say, in Maryse Condé’s The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana.  And the ending is…well, let’s just say there’s more than one surprise reveal at the end and it’s a bit of a roller-coaster.  Definitely one of my favourites of the year.  Anne Serre’s The Beginners, a story of a woman falling out of love with a husband and into love with someone else is…I don’t know.  Reasonably well done, but not for me, really.

I picked up by Liquidation, by Imre Kertesz, at a little bookstore in Krakow (Massolit Books, it’s very good, drop in if you are ever there).  It’s about Auschwitz and the secrets and betrayals of Communist Hungary.  I suppose it’s a meditation on how difficult it is to pull meaning out of something as enormous and unfathomable as the Holocaust.  Not bad, but not terrible satisfying, either.  Much more interesting – and my definite pick as fiction of the year – is Memory Monster by Yishai Sharid.  The story of an Israeli graduate history student pushed into Holocaust studies (because that’s where the money and work is) who becomes a tour guide at Auschwitz, the story tracks his gradual assumption of an all-consuming contempt for the Israelis who visit the camp and who he comes to believe have a sneaking if unconscious sympathy for the Nazis.  The politics of this book are fascinating – and the sharp twist at the end is good, too.

Top 5 fiction (not really enough for a Top 10 this year).

5 – Beowulf, translated byMaria Dahvana Headley

4 – The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips

3- Older Brother, by Mahir Guven

2 – Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart

1 – Memory Monster, by Yishai Sharid

Nonfiction 2019-20: Economics, Society, Sports and the Rest

This is the last in this three-part series covering the non-fiction from the last two years.  Ready? Set? go.

Economics (mostly pop-econ, but still)

It has been a pretty rough couple of years in pop economics, so I don’t have a whole lot to recommend in this field.  Let me whip through these quickly then

As far as economic history goes, I read both Turbulent Empires: A History of Global Capitalism Since 1945 by Mike Mason and Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Rocked the World by Adam Tooze.  The former is merely competent, the latter is bit more lively and creates one continuous narrative stitching together the 2008 disaster in the United States with the Eurozone crisis with Grexit.  If you feel like reliving that horror-show of a decade or so, by all means read Tooze.  The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour and Power in the Age of Information by Carl Benedikt Frey, tries to take a longue durée look at what Goldin & Katz term “the race between education and technology”.  Frey is famous as the co-author of the prediction that “47% of US jobs were at risk of automation, and it seems to me that this book was written largely to rehabilitate his reputation and prove he’s not a luddite.  The book mostly pushes the line that technological change is good in the long run but can cause significant dislocation along the way depending on such factors as mobility, access to skills, state power configurations, etc.  Useful in that it situates present day problems in a much longer historical context; not so useful in that the range of policy prescriptions actually isn’t all that interesting.  The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen is a similar long durée take on economics but for the life of me I could not tell you what the overall point of the book was (something about the Easterlin paradox and GDP being a bad measure of progress, I think).

Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation by Anton Howes, Aesthetics, Industry and Science: Hermann von Helmholz and the Berlin Physical Society by M. Norton Wise both focus on the role of small networks of people around the time of the dawn of modern capitalism (which was a bit later in Germany than England) and who worked at the nexus of art, science and industry.  Howes is the definitely the easier read (I predict great things for him as a historian), but Norton Wise is probably the more interesting (if vastly more technical) story, which basically all takes place withing about five block of the Unter Den Linden over the space of many twenty years, and how artistic, technical and military schools were developed in such a way that set Prussia on the way to being the continent’s dominant military power sixty years later. 

I am trying – for reasons related to my work with universities – to get a better handle on the link between knowledge, innovation and growth.  So I read The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (absolutely unintelligible), The Economics of Knowledge by Dominique Foray (intelligible but only occasionally useful), and Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: the Coevolution of Firms, Technology and National Institutions by Johann Peter Murmann (really interesting, but unclear how much of the lessons of the dynamics of the German/British/American chemical dye industries in the late 1800s are still relevant today). 

On the pop econ side, there was a lot of “how the hell did we get into mess books”.  Top among these, probably, is The Riches of this Land: The Untold Story of America’s Middle Class by Jim Tankersley (upshot: elites have kept whites and blacks fighting against each other instead of uniting for collective bargaining/political action); Not Working: Where Have All the Good jobs Gone by David Blanchflower (upshot: everything is worse than you think because underemployment).  The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise of Canada’s 1% by Lars Osberg is Canada’s contribution to this lit, but frankly it’s relatively unconvincing: inequality overall in Canada as measured by the gini coefficient has barely moved in twenty years, and while there has been a marked increase in the take of the top 1%, it’s mostly centerd in Toronto and has not – unlike the US – led to a massive change in political influence of the upper class (for which we have relatively strict electoral financing laws to thank).

There is the “what to do now”-type of books.  Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, The Economics of Belonging, by Martin Sandbu, and Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We can Do About It by Heather Boushey all are more or less on the same page in terms of making the economy fairer (the first two are a little heavier on income support and the latter a bit heavier on inclusion of women and minorities).  If you don’t pay enormous attention to mainstream economics, you might like these books; if you do, there is nothing really new in any of them, though the way the broader arguments are weaved from the data might be of interest.  In a different vein is  Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, by Johnathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, is basically a long paean to what we in Canada know as “Superclusters”, which they think are the key to American economic revival (I am exaggerating a bit – their proposal is a bit more coherent than our superclusters, and let’s be honest there are a lot more US cities than Canadian ones which have the kinds of financial depth to support  thriving start-up cultures in new industries, so it’s not an entirely crazy idea, but you know, colour me a bit skeptical).

Two final books to mention: Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav and Too Small to Fail: Why Some Small Nations Outperform Larger Ones and How They are Re-Shaping the World by R. James Breiding.  Bernav is *very* good in the sense that his is one of the very few books to forthrightly point out that the OMG-Fourth-Revolution-will-change-everything-robots-are-coming-for-all-the-jobs story is patent nonsense, good enough in fact that you can wade your way through all the handwaving about a post-scarcity economy and still fell it’s a decent book.  Breiding on the other hand….look, every couple of years someone does a book on small economies, or Scandinavian economies, or emerging economies or whatever, and the “lessons” they have for the rest of it.  It’s mostly nonsense.  Really, what they tend to do is pick on one really cool thing in each country (say, transportation in the Netherlands) and say “how cool would it be if we could do this?” (where we = Americans).  This isn’t about national “outperformance”, it’s that a number of countries are demonstrably good at one or two things in which they have acquired some advantage.  The only decent book of this kind of books if you ask me is Mark Zachary Taylor’s The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology (which I reviewed back here).  Breiding’s effort is not at the same level.

The Populist Era

There have been a lot of books out in the last couple of years either on the threat to democracy posed by populism, or on analyzing the nature of the Trump and his appeal.  Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump is short sweet and persuasive, Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age by Martin Moore is less so.  William Davies’ Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason is wildly uneven: occasionally very good (especially on the place of experts and expertise and modern society) but frankly falling down in terms of creating a cohesive narrative.  Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum is very good on the rise of Law and Justice on Poland but less convincing when it comes to the rise of Trump.  How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt is a pretty good back about the importance of democratic norms (more of a novel line of argument in early 2018 when it came out that it is today) though less so when it comes to how to restore them.  Finally, there is the book everyone said “foresaw” the populist revolt under Trump, Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.  Lots of people thought this book was great: I thought it was only so-so.  I though it was very good in general on how the internet transforms both communications and the nature of the “publics” attached to any given issue.  However, some of the “observations” he makes about American politics to buttress his views are flat-out wrong; in fact, his take on Obama is so massively torqued that I have trouble taking anything else he says seriously.

Sports

I normally adore Jonathan Wilson’s books, but I found The Barcelona Inheritance: The Evolution of Winning Soccer Tactics from Cruyff to Guardiola a bit quotidian.  Unlike Angles With Dirty Faces (Argentina), or Behind the Curtain (Eastern Europe), it sticks to familiar locales in Europe’s Big Three Leagues, and unlike Inverting the Pyramid it sticks to a limited period of time, following the coaching careers of a group of people who passed through Barcelona in the 90s (mainly Mourinho and Guardiola).  It’s good, don’t get me wrong: it’s just that you don’t feel you are discovering things on every page the way you are in most of his books.  Zonal Marking: From Ajax to Zidane, the Making of Modern Soccer by Michael W. Cox, is maybe a more interesting book on tactics.  Certainly it’s a bit more controversial, dividing up the history of European football since 1992 into a series of four-year “eras” – Dutch, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German and finally English.  It mostly works until you get to that last one.  But in any case, it’s arguably a better guide to early twentieth century football than Wilson’s effort.

I did not find Soccer Under the Swastika: Defiance and Survival in the Nazi Camps and Ghettos by Kevin E. Simpson to be all that enlightening.  If you are looking for soccer-as-and-organizing-principle-for-resistance-to oppression, try instead More Than Just a Game: Football v. Apartheid by Check Knorr and Marvin Close.  Barefoot to Boots: the many Lives of Indian Soccer by Novy Kapadia is an extremely niche book that I expect none of you to actually read, but I really enjoyed it because it made me think about what it takes to create durable national leagues.  We take these for granted all over the world, but due to poverty and geography, these never really came into play in India until comparatively recently (at which point it became cursed by having two competing leagues).  Instead, what it had for decades were a bunch of local leagues and then regular invitational tournaments (which sometimes also featured international competition).  Intriguing if not entirely riveting.

I read two books on Brazilian football this Doctor Socrates: Footballer, Philosopher, Legend by Andrew Downie and Kaiser: The Greatest Player Never to Play Football by Rob Smyth.  The first – I don’t know, really.  I don’t think this was the author’s intention but I mostly came away from it thinking that Socrates was perhaps too massively self-absorbed to be a genuine avatar of democracy.  The Smyth book, on the other hand, is one of the greatest Shaggy Dog stories I’ve ever read: about a marginally talented Brazilian footballer, Kaiser, who “looked the part” and could organize parties like no one else basically kept getting drafted into top-division football teams basically because he was good for morale.  It’s gloriously batshit, I recommend it as a beach read whenever we are let out of our homes again.

Finally, two more “global surveys” of football.  James’ Montague’s 1312: Among the Ultras (1312 being the numeric translation of ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards).  I admire Montague: somehow he has managed to get people to pay him to go to football matches and football culture in all sorts of weird out-of-the-way-places (see his earlier books Thirty-One Nil: On the Road With Football’s Outsiders: A World Cup Odyssey and When Friday Comes: Football War and Politics in the Middle East).  That said, I’ve often not a fan of the way he inserts himself into the story, but it really works in this book, where he comes face-to-face with Nazis and criminals on three continents.  At one level, ultra-dom is universally held together by testosterone, adventurism, and opposition to governmental authority (most often but not exclusively in the form of the police).  But on the other hand, the local expressions of this can be very different, with local politics and economic making the phenomenon play out very differently in different parts of the world; as an MLS fan, I appreciated his coming over to LA and acknowledging that a different brand of ultra-dom, inclusive of race, gender is being born at least at some clubs (NYCFC however, with its Proud Boy supporters clubs, can fuck right off).  There was The Age of Football: Soccer and the 21^st Century by David Goldblatt.  Now I loved Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer.  Most amazing history of football ever.  But this new book left me cold.  It is encyclopedic in the sense that few countries’ current footballing situations are left uncovered (there’s 2/3 of a page on Kyrgyz football, ffs, but for some reason Canada is passed over in silence).  But it’s dry and bleak (if you’ve heard one story of money corrupting football, you’ve heard them all) and frankly I don’t want encyclopedic.  Maybe twenty years ago when I was just getting into football lit I might have appreciated it, but that was a long time ago.  

In fact, after 20 years of reading this stuff, I have decided that football literature is mostly tapped out.  All the national histories of football are done, pretty much.  I would read new books that take in completely new topics or new regions – I have one on Turkish football on a shelf downstairs, and I might keep practicing my not-very-good Italian and Spanish by reading books in those languages – but other than that I think I am mostly done with the genre (football biographies will keep coming, of course, but those rarely interest me).  So this year I shifted to another sport: basketball.  I started with Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure by Alexander Wolff, which was written about twenty years ago and was meant I think to be a kind of Hoops version of Simon Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy.  It’s good.  It’s not Kuper-good, and being 20 years out of date it seems to under-emphasize African ball, but it’s worth a read. The Undisputed guide to Pro Basketball History by Freedarko is an irreverent and amusingly-illustrated short history of American pro ball.  Peter Axhelm’s The City Game: Basketball From the Garden to the Playgrounds, published in 1971, must have been quite ground-breaking when it first appeared: half the story of the championship-winning New York Knicks, and half the story of basketball as played in the playgrounds of Harlem.  I can’t say the Knicks part is too absorbing because I have no frame of reference for any of the players apart from Bill Bradley – heck, 85% of the story happened before I was born, but the rest is interesting.

Beyond basketball, I read The History of Karate and the Masters Who Made It by Mark J. Cramer, mainly to get a sense of what LMS was doing (and also getting ideas for a trip to Okinawa next year.  A lucky find in the world oddest airport bookstore (Renaissance Books at in the Milwaukee Airport, where you literally can buy the entire Encyclopedia Judaica) was a 70s-era book on sumo entitled Takamiyama: The World of Sumo by Jesse Kuhaulua, the first American yusho winner and Ozeki.  Not much new in here from a sporting POV for me – more confirmation that anything else about how little the sport has changed over the past fifty years.  And finally, there was Beyond a Boundary, by CLR James.  Which, to be honest, was something less than what I was expecting.  Not a bad book, but my expectations were too high, I guess.

Other Stuff

I don’t read a lot of books about the arts – performing or otherwise – but I read a few things of note.  If you have any interest in classic sci-fi, then Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee is a must-read.  It’s partly a history of the magazine Astounding, which Campbell edited for a couple of decades, and partly a history of the three major writers he recruited (Asimov, Heinlein and Hubbard).  Wild stuff – particularly about Hubbard and the origins of Scientology.  All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of the Wire by Jonathan Abrams is an ok oral history of the series.  Finally, there was The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christophe Booker which is a fascinating analysis of global story-telling norms but a) is easily three hundred pages too long and b) pretty Western-centric.  Worth skimming, anyway.  Rockonomics: A Backstage pass of What the Music Industry Can teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger (who unfortunately died by suicide not long before the book was published) is a great examination of the music industry.

There were a bunch of books that I assumed would be better than they were.  I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, A.M. Gittlitz, should have been absolutely spell binding.  Latin American Trostkyite cult with an ET fixation?  What is not to love?  But actually it was kind of boring.  Cities in Civilization by Peter Hall, a 1000-page tome divided into 20-odd 40-50 page essays on particular periods of efflorescence in the world’s great cities.  Sounds fascinating.  And I had lugged this book around from house to house for almost twenty years after buying it in the British Museum in – I think – 2001.  And I finally set aside part of this summer to read it.  And my God what a disappointment.  Just one story after another – almost no integrative theory (there is some, actually, but it’s not very good).  And then War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Shaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century by David Patrikarakos.  Just…I dunno, maybe important if you want to see good the Israeli Defence Forces’ twitter game is, but otherwise meh. 

The Meritocracy Trap by David Markovits was deeply annoying (that’s the short version: the longer one is here) because a) he keeps getting plutocracy and meritocracy confused and b) that his problem is not so much with awarding positions based on effort and talent, but on the way the rich can game the system to ensure their children are seen as having a monopoly on both.  Which, you know, fair enough, but it’s not the same thing.  A somewhat more interesting and multi-cultural look at the process of elite formation is Stepping into Elites: Trajectories of Social Achievement in India, France and the United States by Jules Naudet & Renuka George.  Very interesting if you actually want to think about social mobility outside of a narrow American perspective.  In a similar vein, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, is a good primer on how early human societies gradually developed a hierarchical structure – surely a useful remedy for all those who seem to think inequality is a product of modern capitalism (though James C. Scott’s brilliant Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is an excellent reminder no to get too carried away with interpreting human history based exclusively on the stories of sedentary peoples: as in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, he puts in a useful case for why many – even most – people tried to get our of sedentary city-states if they could, on the basis of the whole massive exploitation thing).

I liked Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, by Gary Marcus: it’s a concise debunking of most of the worst “the robots are coming” nonsense out there.  I was less keen on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shohsana Zuboff.  I mean, she’s not wrong, exactly, but nor is she anywhere near as novel as she thinks she is (and God does she lay it on thick). 

Higher quality books in this category include Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney (which I read in 2019, not 2020).  A very good book in many ways, but what is most interesting about it now, perhaps, is the almost complete lack of detail on how life changed socially after the pandemic (the answer, apparently, is “not very much”, which is a reason I think to be skeptical about claims about how much the pandemic will change in our lives long-term).  The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking by Adam Sisman is a hilarious tale of a fake sometimes-priest, fake sometimes-religious studies professor who managed to keep getting appointed to academic positions for about 30 years despite a total lack of qualifications – an interesting reminder of what academia was like prior to the internet.  Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air, a history of early twentieth-century anthropology, focussed especially on Margaret Mead, is flipping excellent – every discipline should have an origin story this good. 

And then, finally, there is Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom, which is simply brilliant.  Has there ever been a book this witty about feminism and race?  Everyone needs to read this.

I can’t quite pull a top ten out of all this, mainly because all the econ books were so mediocre, but if I have to a top five, it would be:

5. Kaiser: The Greatest Player Never to Play Football by Rob Smyth

4. Zonal Marking: From Ajax to Zidane, the Making of Modern Soccer by Michael W. Cox

3. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

2. Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King

1. Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Non-fiction 2019-20, History and politics (Eastern Hemisphere)

This is part 2 of my review of non-fiction books I’ve read in the last two years (I am to do this once a year so it is more manageable, but didn’t quite manage to complete one last year so you get a two-fer this year).  I’ve split the non-fiction set into a three: one on history/politics of the Americas (back here), this one here that takes the Other Hemisphere, and a third on I’ll have out by the weekend on economics/policy/sports and Other Fun Things.

Ready?  Let’s Go.

Ancient and Medieval Eurasia

I have read a fair bit of stuff on ancient Rome over the last few years.  It’s not really a matter of getting into “decline and fall” literature; rather, it is kind of interesting to see how the definition of “success” changed over hundreds of years, and how the Roman Empire kept redefining success in such a way that – batshit crazy years between Commodus and Aurelian notwithstanding – the empire remained “successful” for about 800 years, pretty much all the way until the plague of Justinian in 561.  There aren’t unfortunately actually that many good “big sweep” histories of Rome (Mary Beard’s SPQR tails off around the time Commodus comes to power) so you kind of have to come at it piecemeal.  Two Routledge histories of Rome have struck me as pretty good:   The Roman Empire at Bay 180 -395 by David S. Potter and The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD 395-700 by Averill Cameron.  There are a bunch of “Emperor” histories from relatively low-rent specialist publishers which can fill in some of the gaps, the best of which I thought was Peter Crawford’s Constantius II: Usurpers, Eunuchs and the Antichrist which deals with the eastern frontier with Persia better than most.  Stilicho: the Vandal Who Saved Rome by Ian Hughes is not bad in terms of understanding the ethnically complex world of the late western empire.  Marcus Agrippa (yes, I know, he’s not an Emperor) by Lindsay Powell is a reasonable alternate lens on the reign of Augustus.  Two books by Robert Knapp – Invisible Romans and  The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in a Time of Magic and Miracles – have zero to do with high politics but are all the better as a result for understanding popular Roman culture (the latter in particular I think is interesting for understanding how superstition worked in everyday like and how that could lead to popular charismatic movements).

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin is not so much a full history of the thousand-year as it is snippets of interesting cultural and political history across nearly a millennium.   It’s probably the only sensible way to fit 1000 years into under 350 pages but I still felt like I was missing a lot.  This was not a feeling I experience while reading Christianity the First Three Thousand Years by Diarmid MacCullough. 1100 pages of full-on history of the Christian religion.  I was really only interested until about the reformation, which left a lot of pages to slog through.  Walter Schiedl’s Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity got some breathless praise about a year ago when it came out, I guess from people who really wanted a non-fiction version of the Foundation series.  Basically, the argument is that once Rome died, there was no real possibility of Western civilization staying in the same polity and this is good because pluralism = competition and we were all the better for it.  The first point is probably true but requires a lot of “just so” stories to “prove” it and the second one is largely conjecture.  I didn’t find it hugely convincing; if that kind of macro-history floats your boat, Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules for Now is much better.

Finally, two books on this period from the Eastern end of the continent: Rise of the Tang Dynasty by Julian Romane is good if you like military history and want to read a couple of hundred pages about the dozens of campaigns required to unite the spectacularly fractured post-Han China, and Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael Coe and Damian Evans.  If you are ever heading to South-east Asia to do see Siem Reap and the surrounding area, take this book with you, because it’s excellent.  I wish I had had it when I was there fifteen years ago.

Europe

Starting from west to east: I only read one book about the UK because HOLY SHIT BREXIT IS NON-STOP BRAIN-BENDING DRIVEL and I really have no interest reading any more about the country than I have to, but David Edgerton’s Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History was pretty good.  It is, to a large extent, about the lies Britain – England, really – has told about itself over the past century, though it is less a book about politics than it is about culture and economics.  Most countries would be lucky to have a book this good about themselves (certainly, I can’t think of a Canadian equivalent.  There was also Peter Geoghegan’s Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics which is a Brexit book, sort of, but more about the political technology behind it (not just the Cambridge Analytica stuff but also the “soft” technology of think tanks, “front” organizations and sock-puppet social media) and how it can be used pretty much anywhere.  This precise theme was picked up by David Broder in his book First They Took Rome: How the Populist-Right Conquered Italy which is a decent recap of post-Berlusconi Italy and as far as I know one of the most in-depth analyses of the M5S movement in English.

Staying in Western Europe for a moment: I wasted a day or so on John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia(again – books about organized crime are always way less interesting that they appear).  Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944  by Matthew Cobb was ok but not great.   France in crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization since 1980 is probably not for everyone in the sense that it is a fairly technical book about the French welfare state but if you ever want to understand what a mess it is and why “insiders” and “outsiders” fare so differently in France, this is a really good book (and the fact that it was written by a Canadian means that the policy analogies are a little easier to pick up).  Basically, a whole lot of the French welfare system is occupationally driven rather than “universal”, which causes all kinds of problems and make the Canadian system look extraordinarily good by comparison.  And I rounded all this off with a couple of books about Finland: A History of Finland by Henrik Meinlander and Finntopia: What We Can Learn from the World’s Happiest Country by Daniel Dorling, both of which are reasonably short and easily digestible.  The surprising thing for me in these books was how recent much of the Finnish welfare state is – in some ways even more recent that Canada’s – and you don’t have to be quite as uncritical a cheerleader as Dorling to be impressed by the quiet doggedness with which the country has pursued its social and economic goals over the past fifty years.

Heading south for a bit: there have been a string of books over the past few years trying to unpick what’s gone wrong in Eastern Europe and why things seem to be sliding backwards towards atavistic nationalism (this is especially puzzling in Poland which I think genuinely has the ability to become a massive economic power house over the next 20 years – if the Law & Justice crowd don’t fuck it up entirely).  The most comprehensive of these books in terms of historical scope is Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams by John Feffer.  The answer, more or less, is that a fair bit of what seemed like anti-communism/pro-marketism in 1989 was merely anti-Russianism and a bid for national renewal.  And while the former had ascendancy for as long as it seemed greater prosperity was in the air, things changed quickly after 2008 and the authoritarian nationalists gained ascendancy.  Of course, lots of people like authoritarians even without the nationalists – just because they give a sense of order and belonging.  These people are mostly the subject of Witold Szablowski’s  Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life under Tyranny.  They are also sort of the subject of  Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova, but this book is more interesting because it also a kind of travelogue of the area of the Rhodope Mountains where Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey all meet and my God it sounds like the most fascinating place on Earth.  Usually I only read travelogues because I’m going someplace and want to know something specific about the area or have just come back from somewhere and need to interpret what I’ve seen; this is the first one I have read in a long while that was about a place I knew nothing about and now desperately want to go (although, tbf  I haven’t been on a plane for nine months now and I have to say I would go pretty much anywhere right now just to get that feeling of freedom of being in planes and hotels again).

Going back a little bit in history, there was Twilight of Empire: the Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking East-Central Europe 1917-1918 by Borislav Chernev, which was pretty interesting.  It was less about the lopsidedness of the eventual deal the Germans drove than it was about how Trotsky tried to use the conference to talk endlessly about national self-determination.  And yes, that was mainly a tactic to screw over the Austrians and play for time while World Revolution broke out (and a wave of strikes in Vienna did come close to knocking the Habsburgs out of the war in January 1918), but it foreshadowed all the later Versailles drama on the same subject and ran up against the same issues in terms of turning lofty rhetoric into solid geographical solutions where the ethnic mixtures were deeply complicated (I had not realized exactly the extent of Bulgarian claims in Romania, which were basically intended to claim the entire Black Sea coast which is bananas).  Of the same time period is The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution 1918-1921 by Eric Lee which is a reminder a) that there were other and more humane socialisms besides Bolshevism that were in the running at the end of World War I and b) none of them stood a goddamn chance against the Bolshevik army.  Finally, there was Comrade Baron by Jaap Scholten, which is mainly about ethnically Hungarian nobility in Romania, how their lands were taken away in the 1940s and 1950s and – tangentially – how some of their descendants tried to get at least some of these properties back in the 1990s.  This is not a brilliant book or anything (and if you’re a Romania regular, it is disconcerting to see all your familiar placenames in Hungarian), but again, it desperately made me want to spend a week or so doing a long, winding drive around Transylvania, from Oradea to Sibiu with as many detours as possible.

Finally, the Russian stuff.  Sheila FitzPatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics is a really interesting examination of the dynamics of the politburo under Stalin, which suggests that the “Stalin terrorized everyone into submission” is a little overdone and that the people like Ordzonikidze and Malenkov and Mikoyan were genuinely a “team”.  I am not sure I buy the thesis entirely, but it’s a book worth reading before re-watching The Death of Stalin.  How Not to Network a Nation: The Unsteady History of the Soviet Internetby Benjamin Peters is an interesting story about Soviet science and how difficult it was to do when you had to clear everything through many levels of bureaucracy (at least the non-military bits, anyway).  Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World by Ilya Yablokov is interesting.  Think of it as a much more formal academic version of Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, mixed with a little bit of the lunacy described by Charles Clover in Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism and you’ve more or less got it.  Opposition politician Grogory Yavlinsky’s The Putin System was pretty meh – less interesting than I’d expected. 

Middle-East and Africa

I spent a bit of time in Doha a little over a year ago and so read Qatar: A Modern History by Allen J. Fromherz and, well, look, part of the problem is that the source material on Gulf monarchies isn’t exactly open-access and second, if you write something too critical, they won’t let you back into the country, so like many books about the region it’s not what you’d call gripping stuff.  The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan is a reminder that “Arabs” is too diverse an ethnic categorization to make for a coherent history.  Lebanon: A Country in Fragments by Andrew Arsan is interesting stylistically in that it is about 40% straight-up political chronicling (from the assassination of Hariri up to the mid 2010s) and 60% sociological examination of Lebanon’s many diverse micro-societies (super-difficult because of the way ethnicity, religion and class overlap).  I mean the problem of course is that Lebanon is just too bewildering and I found myself overwhelmed a lot of the time.  Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, by Anshel Pfeffer of the newspaper Haaretz, was pretty good as political biographies go, and certainly helps you better understand his essentially Trump-y appeal.

But my two favourite books in this category were Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and The Third World Order by Jeffrey James Byrne and Algiers Third World Capital by Elaine Mokhtefi.  We forget now that Algeria was actually a pretty happening place in the early 1960s: a symbol of anti-colonialism during its fight for independence, and then afterwards, as Byrne says, a kind of hangout for revolutionary leaders from around the world, as de rigeur a stop back then as Porto Alegre was in the early 2000s (if any of you followed my advice to read Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us: Love and terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking, you’ll remember the unforgettable scenes of the Black Panthers in exile in Algiers – and if you haven’t taken that advice yet what the hell are you waiting for?).  Yet while Mecca of Revolution tellsa useful kind of big-picture history, it is Mokhtefi’s book that will stick in your mind.  An American in Paris in the 1950s, she became a convert to the FLN cause, and worked for it diligently for decades in New York, Paris and Algiers – including as the liaison to the Black Panthers!  But maybe the most interesting part of the story here is how she viewed the 1965 coup and endured the subsequent loss of idealism.  A very worthwhile book.

On the African side, Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith is meant to give a multi-milllenial sweeping history of the African continent.  It’s competent but not exactly spell-binding.  Stephen Chan’s Southern Africa: Old Treacheries and New Deceits is now a bit out of date, but is an interesting examination of politics in Zimbabwe and South Africa (and in particularly the way the two were entwined) for about a decade from the start of the land occupations through to the start to the Zuma period.  Upshot: anyone who thought the ANC would allow there to be any daylight between themselves and Mugabe was crazy, even though the MDC was much closer in everyday political outlook to the party of Mandela and Mbeki.  Basically: the legacy of common anti-colonial struggle roots trumped everything.  The Horn of Africa: State Formation and Decay by Christopher Clapham is maybe a bit too political-science oriented for some, but it’s actually a very valuable way to think about a collection of countries with some common history but also very divergent recent pasts.  I was kind of hoping that Guinea-Bissau: Micro-State to Narco-State (Chabal and Green, eds) would do the same on the other side of the continent, but not really.   

One country that is starting to get more attention these days is Angola.  Lara Pawson’s  In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre is a fantastic re-construction of an attempted coup in 1977 and the resulting purge and massacre of Eduardo Dos Santos’s political opponents.  Quite gripping stuff – in particular the way Pawson dissects the unwillingness of the regime’s western sympathizers to admit what had happened.  Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is a clinical examination of how the country was the site of non-stop looting once Savimbi was defeated and killed.  Of particular interest now that Dos Santos’ children are being targeted by the regime, I think. 

China

As far as Chinese history goes, I did a little less than usual in 2020, but I imagine I will be back on this kick in 2021.  I tried to appreciate A History of Chinese Political Thought by Youngmin Kim but frankly it mostly went over my head.  I did, however, enjoy From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society Xiaotong Fei, which apparently is one of the foundational works of Chinese sociology.  Not the first book I’d pick to get acquainted with the country, but good if you’ve already spent a fair bit of time etting acquainted with the country.  Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age is not bad, though I think a less compelling book than his earlier Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, about the Taiping Rebellion.  Pre-war Shanghai is – rightly – the subject of endless fascination but unfortunately not always great historical literature.  City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French is a vastly overblown story about the criminal underworld in the late 1930s.  The Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue and Treason in World War II by Bernard Wasserstein is a bit more interesting as a work of – takes place over a longer period of time, and situates the demi-monde more firmly in the great power intrigues of the era – but it, too, mistakes intrigue for importance.   The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China, by James Palmer, is about an interesting but somewhat overlooked moment in history: a massive earthquake which killed over 250,000 people but the state was to transfixed with the power-struggle surrounding Mao’s death in Beijing to respond properly. 

Onto more contemporary China: Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China by David Bandurski is quite a fascinating look at how some communities choose to fight urban development schemes.  Lesser Dragons: Minority Peoples of China by Michael Dillon is comprehensive but not exactly gripping.  I would group three books: Youth Cultures in China Jeroen de Kloey & Anthony Fung, China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation by Bradley M. Gardner were and China and the New Maoists, by Kerry Brown and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen under the heading of “stuff I read eighteen months ago but were sufficiently unmemorable that I can’t remember a word of their contents .”

There is always a lively trade in books which explain why China is important/dangerous/destined to crash, and I read four of them in 2019.  On the vastly overstated end was China’s Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon whish argues…well, the title does not leave much to the imagination, I guess.  Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy by George Magnus is also pessimistic vein but leaves out the apocalyptics: if you want a fairly standard “Xi is an authoritarian and this will eventually get in the way of the kind of economy he wants to build” take, this books is fine (it’s worth remembering that Xi was most of the way through his first term as leader before western writers definitively plumped for the view that he was not, in fact, a reformer).    The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State by Elizabeth Economy is a better book on roughly the same topic, though it is less gloomy about China’s chances and much more geared to a Washington “what should we do about the rise of China” crowd.  The best of these books though, is Carl Minzer’s End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise.  The thesis is closer (identical?) to Magnus’ than Economy’s but it is (IMHO) much better written – in my view the best of the recent books on the subject.  China takes get old fast, so possibly in another 3-4 years none of these books will look crazy/irrelevant, but for the moment anyway, if you need a single “whither the Middle Kingdom” book, choose Minzer.

The Rest of East Asia

I was supposed to go to Japan this year. LMS was supposed to get her Black Belt in June, and we were then going to go to Tokyo and Okinawa with a stop in Fukuoka to take in a couple of days of the November basho.  Well, COVID delayed the belt until about ten days ago (which means she is no longer just Little Miss Sumo but also Little Miss Shodan) and the actual voyage until God know when – probably next November.  This delay bummed me out immensely because I’m never really as happy as I am when I am in Japan.  So I read about the country instead.

(It’s tempting to rationalize my bibliophilia as therapy – gives it a positive spin.  I don’t think it’s accurate though.  Too easy.  Too pat.)

Anyways, Japan: L.M. Cullen’s A History of Japan 1582-1941: Internal and External Worlds is an interesting periodization if nothing else.  Thing of it as a “long Tokugawa” period – that is, the actual Tokugawa period plus 20 years on the front end and 80 years on the back.  I wouldn’t say the prose flows very freely, but I think if you want a single-volume history of the Tokugawa period, this might be it.  Japan Story: In Search of a Nation 1850 to the Present by Christopher Harding, is a more conventional post-Black Ships periodization, but it’s anything but a standard history.  Japan is easy to caricature as an ultra-conformist space, and it has certainly been to the ruling class’ advantage to perpetuate this idea.  Much of the Meiji revolution was about working out how Japan could gain western levels of technical sophistication without losing its rigid and very hierarchical social structure (one could argue the Abe government is just the latest manifestation of this).  But as Harding shows, that’s never been fully successful and there is an alternate and much more rewarding history of Japan which focusses precisely on the non-conformists and those who pushed back on the conformity.  All in all a very good book.

Two more focused piece of Japanese history were Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan’s Modern History by Harry Harootunian, a set of essays on 19^th and 20^th century Japan which I feel compares unfavourably with poking out your eyes with hot knitting needles. Also, D.M. Giangreco’s Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1943-1947, by D.M. Giangreco, which was very interesting.  Most people who spend a lot of time arguing about history at some point end up arguing the point about whether or not the Hiroshima bombing was justified.  This book won’t settle that question, but in giving an understanding both of American and Japanese war planning in mid-1945 (and what each knew about the others plans), it is a lot easier to understand why the decision was made.  Short version: American casualties were actually relatively low until the invasion of Europe began, and the effects on domestic morale of tend of thousands of casualties every month was worrying to American planners.  The Japanese were betting on the fact that non-stop suicide attacks on invading  Americans would demoralize the enemy on the home front even if they could not be defeated on the battlefield, and – crucially – American generals thought they were right.  Interesting stuff.  The last book on the list here is Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan.  It’s short, light and fluffy and packed with observations (not all of which I buy, whatever).  If one day we get to travel again and you decide to visit: buy it and read it on the plane over.

I also read a bunch of stuff from across the rest of East Asia as well.  There is a lot of good stuf coming out on North Korea these days.  The Great Successor by the brilliant Anna Fifield will still be the standard bio of Kim Jong Un 30 years from now.  See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey Into Kim Jong Un’s North Korea by Travis Jeppesen is more ephemeral (it is the story of someone who decided to go to North Korea to lean the language, and along the way gets at least a little bit of makes Pyongyang work), but not a bad book by any means.  The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam by Christopher Goscha is a serious history of the country since 1800 and a pretty good one, too.  It’s easy in a country which was colonized the way Vietnam was to tell history as something which happened to a country, or something inflicted on a country.  But without minimizing the brutality of colonization, it is possible to tell the story in a way which does not minimize the agency of the colonized, how they attempted both to resist the system but also to work it to their advantage, and this book does that very well.  It probably contains too much detail for a really casual reader (which in this case I was), but still good nevertheless.   Dark Shadows: inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan by Joanna Lillis was ok: I wouldn’t call it brilliant but being one of the few books in English on central Asia, it has the advantage of (relative) novelty.  Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21^st Century is a decent account of how Aung San Suu Kyi went from being the West’s darling to an outcast, the roots of the Rohyinga crisis .  But it’s a bit western-centric and really focussed on only the last 25 years or so.  I think Myint-Us earlier book, Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia is actually a better choice if what you want is a feel for the country as a whole.

South Asia

I was in India in late 2018 and realized I knew practically nothing about the place, a condition I set out to rectify.  India: A History by John Keay, is hands down one of the best 2000-year civilizational histories I;ve ever read (the only other one which is comparable is also be Keay- China: A History.  The key to these kinds of books is knowing what to omit, and he is very, very good at that.  I learned a lot in this book – my knowledge of India was pretty restricted to the Mughals and what they were doing in the Northwest of the country, and this book corrected that both in terms of understanding the recurring pattern of imperial rises and falls along the Ganges, but also the quite different civilizations which would pop up in the south and along the east coast.  Really accessible and excellent.

Going down a level in terms of historical detail, I read Ashoka in Ancient India by Nayanjot Lahiri, which was just ok.  Then there was India in the Persianate Age 1000-1765by Richard M. Eaton: probably too niche if you only have a casual interest in the sib-continent, but if you happen to be interested in the level of east-west cultural exchange between Persia and India, this is the book for you.  The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empireby William Dalrymple has deservedly got a lot of attention this year and it is indeed excellent (makes my top ten, anyway): the story of one of the greatest and most literal expressions of corporate power ever.  A good companion to this is Jon Wilson’s India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Passions of Empire which covers some of the same ground but extends the coverage through to the end of the Empire in 1947.  India since Independence by Bipan Chandra takes you from 1947 into this century.  It’s pretty good – I learned a lot here about regional politics and tensions within the country – but at 710 fairly dense pages, it is not for the faint of heart.

On the subject of caste, I read Sumit Guha’s Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present which is an academic treatment of the subject which was ok (upshot: you need to think of caste as much or more as a British construct as an Indian one), but far less interesting than Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla. Partly the autobiography of woman from an untouchable family in Andhra Pradesh, and partly a biography of her uncle, who joined a Maoist guerilla group to fight for dalit rights, it’s utterly absorbing.  And I read a lot on Indian politics: When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics by Milan Viashnav; How to Win an Indian Election by Shivam Shankar Singh, and A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India by Josy Joseph.  Let’s just say that India’s nearly unbroken record of over 70 years as the world’s largest democracy is an impressive one, but the practice of politics, the electoral technologies at work – those can be extremely disturbing.

Oceania

Only a few in this category, all of which related to indigenous peoples.  I find it useful as roundabout way of thinking about settler-indigenous relations here in Canada – seeing how similar processes worked out in dissimilar environments.  The Treaty of Waitangi by Claudia Orange is an interesting story of the treaty signing in 1840 and the process of treaty of re-interpretation (by whites, of course) over the following 60 years or so.  Because it was written a while ago, it’s sadly pretty light on how the Lange government’s re-commitment to original Treaty principles in the 1980s and the development of a Treaty Tribunal to deal with issues of interpretation (something we in Canada can only dream of a legal dispute resolution mechanism this effective), which is a bit unfortunate.  Similarly,  Struggle Without End by Ranginui Walker, a Maori-centred history of Aotearoa ends in the late 1980s and so misses a lot of interesting stuff, but otherwise it’s an interesting exercise in counter-history.  It’s good in many ways, although as a non-Pakeha, I thought it could have used more and better maps to better understand where all the various Iwi and settlements actually were.  From my perspective also, the contrast to the way Indigenous history gets written in Canada was notable – in a sense, this book would be impossible to write in Canada because the Maori are a single identifiable nation while indigenous people in Canada speak of their “national” identity in the plural.  Finally, from Australia, I read Talking to My Country by Stan Grant, an aboriginal CNN journalist.  The themes in here about culture and identity are much more familiar, I think, to a Canadian reader as are the stories about alienation and racism.  What struck me while reading it is that Canada really does not have a First Nations media or cultural figure with anything like Grant’s standing in Australia.  I can’t imagine how that says anything good about us.

Anyways. That’s it.  Here’s my top ten out of all this, though I don’t feel strongly about the order of numbers 4 through 10.

10) Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova

9) Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael Coe and Damian Evans

8) Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History  by David Edgerton

7) In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre by Lara Pawson

6) End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise by Carl Minzer

5) India: A History by John Keay

4) Japan Story: In Search of a Nation 1850 to the Present by Christopher Harding

3) On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila FitzPatrick

2) Algiers Third World Capital by Elaine Mokhtefi

1) The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple