2013 In Books

In the grand tradition of setting overly vague, essentially meaningless goals, one of mine for this past year was to "read more," which was not hard since apparently I read exactly 12 books in 2012. I may have failed to run even 1200 miles this year (thanks mostly to tearing my stupid hip flexor), but damned if I didn't finish 59 books--37 audiobooks, and 22 in hard copy.

(It turns out you can knock out a lot of audiobooks when you spend 2 hours a day in the car. I also listen to them when I'm out running, or doing stuff at work that doesn't require reading/writing/listening to people. So if you'd like to read more but don't have much time for reading books made out of paper, I can highly recommend getting an audible.com subscription & trading out some radio/music time for that.)

Here are my top pics:

For The Athlete:

Becoming a Supple Leopard, by Kelly Starrett. Are you tired of being told that your aches / paints / injuries / etc. will go away if you "just do more yoga / strength work / stretch more"? Do you feel like you're just cobbling together a mix of common sense & pseudo-science & hoping for the best without any clear idea of what is *actually* causing your problems and what is *actually* likely to fix things? If so, you might at the very least find this book interesting. Starrett's philosophy is that “All human beings should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves,” & that we shouldn't be at the mercy of doctors & PTs & trainers & whatnot to diagnose & fix every little ache & pain that comes up.

The New Rules of Marathon & Half-Marathon Nutrition, by Matt Fitzgerald. Probably the most useful & straightforward book I've ever read about nutrition specific to runners. Also, lots of great information that I hadn't seen before. Best of all, everything is based on current scientific evidence, not folk wisdom or outdated facts "everybody knows" from fifteen years ago. I doubt I will ever be even remotely perfect about my nutrition, but now I at least feel like I have a logical framework on which to hang my pitiful attempts.

Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, by Matt Fitzgerald. I first ran across this book a couple of years ago when I was looking for a solid, research-based, user-friendly primer on nutrition for endurance athletes, but dismissed it as probably too numbers-on-the-scale-focused for me. After reading The New Rules, though, I decided to give it a fair shot. Instead of telling you what weight to shoot for, he recommends first determining your body composition (% body fat), then setting an individualized goal. The rest of the book is chock full of science about how the bodies of endurance athletes process various nutrients, & tools for determining & improving the quality of your diet one step at a time.

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, by David Epstein. Is extraordinary athletic performance a question of nature or nurture? Epstein assures us early in the book that it's 100% both. But how? Over sixteen chapters, he delves into a wide range of issues related to athletic performance and genetics, including the role of practice, sex & hormone differences, "trainability", body type, geography, ancestry, injury & disease, pain tolerance, and will power. (The chapter on breeding champion sled dogs for work ethic instead of speed was particularly interesting.) The upshot: there is no simple answer, but the topic is utterly fascination.

Fiction:

The Night Circus, by Erin Morganstern. Without giving away too much plot, this book struck me as Ray Bradbury-meets-Catherynne M. Valente -- beautifully poetic writing, descriptions that appeal to all of the senses, & nostalgic imagery, with a plot that is a sort of modern (well; late 19th century) fairy tale. The characters are carefully crafted and their relationships & interactions are believable and convincing while also subverting your expectations just enough to feel original & refreshing. It's so rare that a love story doesn't make me want to throw up a little, & Celia maybe the best written heroine I have read in a long, long time. I almost couldn't put this book down & that almost never happens to me.

The MaddAddam Trilogy, by Margaret Atwood. (Okay, I am cheating a little because this is actually three books.) Wow. Wow, wow, wow (one for each book--Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam). If you are a Margaret Atwood fan, get thee to a library / bookstore / kindle / whatever post haste--this is probably her best work yet. If you are not a Margaret Atwood fan, how are you not a Margaret Atwood fan???? I don't often do post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but if someone was going to spin a completely original and unique yarn in that genre full of dynamic and interesting characters and masterful writing and straight-up nail it first time out of the gate, I'm not surprised it was her. Fantastic. Could not put it down.

The City and the City, by China Miéville. This book definitely gets props for one of the most unique and interesting premises I can remember. Imagine two cities which occupy the same physical space--ie, some geographical areas are part of one city, others are part of the other, some areas are sort of "cross-hashed" over each other, and some areas exist in both. Also imagine that interacting with or even acknowledging something or someone who is in the other city--even if they are standing right next to you--is the worst crime that exists. Now imagine trying to carry out a murder investigation in one of those cities. A gripping and completely unpredictable story, thanks to the mind-blowing premise & fantastic writing.

Glasshouse, by Charles Stross. It took me a couple of chapters to get into "Glasshouse", but once the main story got going, it was interesting, creative, full of dynamic & believable characters, and actually really funny at times. In order to hide from whoever is trying to kill him, Robin agrees to be part of a sociology experiment where people agree to be put into "ancient"--late 20th century--bodies & live "as the ancients" for a few years so that researchers can see how social interactions & relationships worked. Before the serious stuff goes down, this made for much hilarity without seeming like a gag. Perfect if you want a bit of fun, engaging, interesting, well-written, not-too-creepy-&-weird sci-fi without a serious commitment.

Nonfiction:

Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen.For all that I've generally been aware that US history as it gets taught in school is pretty sterilized and white-washed, until I read this book, I didn't realize the extent to which it was patently falsified (including falsification by selective omission). I lost track of the times over the course of reading this book where I found myself going, "Wait, what????" & backtracking to be sure that I'd actually read what I thought I'd just read. All the inaccuracies & omissions Loewen discusses are backed by primary sources & fully documented, and he invites you to delve deeper & do your own research if you feel disinclined to take him & his sources at their word.

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, by Sam Kean. You might like this book if you 1) enjoy amusing stories about science told with a historical/human interest angle (RadioLab fans, I'm looking at you); 2) knew your chemistry at some point & would kind of like a refresher of the basics, but hate textbooks; 3) are curious about chemistry/particle physics but find terms like "covalence electrons" and "ionic bonds" kind of intimidating; 4) are a young person who has not yet studied chemistry formally (I could totally see this book turning a "fuzzy" on to science); 5) enjoy unconventional histories various & sundry. Entertaining & well-written!

The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future, by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita In this book, the author--a political scientist--discusses how he's spent the last thirty-some-odd years harnessing the power of math & logic (in the form of game theory) to make spookily accurate predictions about business, politics, legal battles, & all kinds of other situations that involve human beings negotiating and scheming for the best possible outcome. And these aren't fields in which he has special expertise or privileged information--as he reminds us over and over and over again, humans who want things are predictable, which means their behavior can be modeled mathematically. Impossible, you say? That must be why Bueno De Mesquita's predictions have something like a 90% success rate.

Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, by Amy Webb. After months of truly horrific online dating & feeling pressured by her mother's terminal illness to find a life partner as soon as possible, newly 30 Amy Webb threw herself into "hacking" J-date using an awe-inspiring level of math, science, and color-coded spreadsheets. The topic may sound superficial, but if you are at all a mathy-codey-hacky-data-loving type of person, you very well may find a lot of her story fascinating. Absolutely, online daters will probably find it even more interesting (and informative), but I enjoyed it purely based on its existence at the weird intersection of statistics & sociology.

If you want to get more book recommendations from me, follow me on GoodReads! I rate & review just about everything I read.

Read any amazing books this year? What else must I not miss??

Assassin's Apprentice (Farseer #1), by Robin Hobb

Whenever the topic of fantasy, particular 'high' fantasy or 'epic' fantasy or whatever term you want to use for books involving feudalism and swordplay and wizards and stew, is raised, I general tend to plant myself firmly in the "meh-not-really-my-bag" camp. (This in spite of the fact that GoodReads would have me believe I've read more fantasy than anything else.) Not because I'm concerned about getting labeled as one of *those* people (you know the stigma I'm referring to), but because in my experience, people who are into high fantasy are REALLY into high fantasy, and frankly just not always that discriminating about, like, plot and characters & stuff. There is just so, so much fantasy out there that is so, *so* unbelievably bad.

(My rule of thumb: Is there a map in the front? Some sort of royal orphan / bastard / otherwise problematic or mislaid heir? People inexplicably eating stew at every meal? Two out of three and I am OUT.)

So generally, unless I have a very trustworthy recommendation, I mostly avoid map-king-stew books, even when they appear over and over on OMG-Must-Read lists as Assassin's Apprentice has. (It actually had an additional strike against it, since the cover that showed up most often depicted some sort of deathly serious-looking man in a hooded cloak. I'm not sure what it is but books with serious men in dark cloaks on the front are almost always universally awful.) But Robin Hobb seemed to be getting a lot of praise from Patrick Rothfuss (who has himself written some *amazing* books with maps in the front & lots of stew-eating & menacing figures in dark cloaks on the cover), so I decided to give the first one a read.

And I have to say, this is the first high fantasy I've read in quite sometime that I didn't want to put down. It was too engrossing, too gorgeously & skillfully written. At the end of each chapter, I had to know what happened next. Somehow Hobb managed to pack in just about every trope in the book (see: The Tough Guide to Fantasyland) and *still* write a unique, unpredictable, yet satisfying story packed with three-dimensional characters and exquisite writing. Well done.

The Sports Gene, by David Epstein

This book was right up my alley. Vetted science & peer-reviewed data? Check. Jaw-dropping feats of strength, skill, & endurance? Check. Melodramatic scenery chewing? Er....okay, I could have done without some of that. But that's sports, I suppose. Still, with the exception of a few passages, the writing is reasonably good. I appreciate that Epstein opens the book with the tired old question of "OMG nature or nurture????" and then immediately answers it: "Duh, both, *obviously*, and everyone hates that answer. So let's talk about interesting stuff." Over sixteen chapters, Epstein delves into a wide range of issues related to athletic performance and genetics, including the role of practice, sex & hormone differences, "trainability", body type, geography, ancestry, injury & disease, pain tolerance, and will power. (The chapter on breeding champion sled dogs for work ethic instead of speed was particularly interesting.) The upshot: there is no simple answer, but the topic is utterly fascination.

The Predictioneer's Game, by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

I've been meaning to read this book since it came out in 2009 (I think?) & couldn't have enjoyed it more. In it, political scientist Bruce Bueno De Mesquita discusses how he's spent the last thirty-some-odd years harnessing the power of math & logic (in the form of game theory) to make spookily accurate predictions about business, politics, legal battles, & all kinds of other situations that involve human beings negotiating and scheming for the best outcome possible. Even more impressive, these aren't fields in which he has any particular expertise or access to privileged information--as he reminds us over and over and over again, humans who want things are predictable, which means their behavior can be modeled mathematically. Once you know just a few things about all the major players (level of influence, desired outcome, how much credit they want, how committed to/flexible they are regarding their desired outcome, & whether they have veto power in the situation), it's just a matter of quantifying those things, feeding the values into the model, & interpreting the results.

Impossible, you say? That must be why Bueno De Mesquita's predictions have had something like a 90% success rate over the course of his career.

I also enjoyed the part where BDM engaged in a bit of retroactive predictioneering--ie, using only his prediction model & information widely available at the time to show that both the Cold War & its resolution were basically preordained at the end of World War II, that Britain likely could've prevented WWI, and Sparta might have survived but for its addiction to horse racing. It was also neat to see that predictions he & his students made in the last chapter using the model (the failure of the Copenhagen Conference to do anything about global warming, & the US upping aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion being enough to get them to stop making side deals with the Taliban Al Qaeda, but not to squash them completely) have come to pass since the book was written in '09.

Brilliant. If you want a friendly, interesting, not-too-technical introduction to game theory (and also how to save hundreds or thousands when buying a car), this book is for you.

Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen

Soooo I pretty much just want to give a copy of this book to every kid I know when they graduate from high school, because damn. For all that I've generally been aware that US history as it gets taught in school is pretty sterilized and white-washed, I didn't realize the extent to which it was patently falsified (including falsification by selective omission). Thankfully I got the AP course in high school, which at the very least meant they had to give us a real text book and not the "Texas Edition" used in the regionally-approved mainstream course (I am not kidding about this), so it seems like my class was maybe marginally more thorough & accurate than what a lot of kids get. Still, I lost track of the times over the course of reading this book where I found myself going, "Wait, what????" & backtracking to be sure that I'd actually read what I thought I'd just read.

All the inaccuracies & omissions Loewen discusses are backed by primary sources & fully documented (it's nice to be able to verify the lies the textbook-industrial complex has raised you on), and he invites you to delve deeper & do your own research if you feel disinclined to take him & his sources at their word. In addition to plain old getting the facts wrong, Loewen discusses the general narratives (sketchy at best, flat-out offensive at worst) to which textbook authors seem to be committed, and how the errors and omissions are carefully selected to prop them up. He also demonstrates how the tone of history textbooks tends to be authoritative and objective, completely understood and agreed-upon and ready for students to memorize, rather than full of controversies and open questions that they might explore and draw conclusions from on their own.

So yes. If you feel like your education in US history was a-okay, I invite you to take a read. It will likely change your outlook not only on the past but on the present & future as well.

Declare, by Tim Powers

Tim Powers weaves a supernatural tale around the real-life facts of the British double agent / defector Kim Philby. (Philby's story was also the inspiration for John le Carré's spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I can also recommend.) I am always impressed by espionage / political intrigue books because of the sheer level of detail & complexity that the author has to keep track of; Declare is even more impressive because so much of it is historical fact. However, I'm not always great at following it myself & frequently have to go back & re-read in order to be sure I really understand what's going on.

The writing is strong and the characters are convincing (particularly Andrew Hale; nothing sells FUBAR like a super-spy scared shitless); in particular, the supernatural parts are done in a kind of "matte finish" that makes them feel eerily believable. In summary, I'd say it reads like Indiana Jones meets 007 meets Tom Clancy.

Declare, by Tim Powers

Tim Powers weaves a supernatural tale around the real-life facts of the British double agent / defector Kim Philby. (Philby's story was also the inspiration for John le Carré's spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I can also recommend.) I am always impressed by espionage / political intrigue books because of the sheer level of detail & complexity that the author has to keep track of; Declare is even more impressive because so much of it is historical fact. However, I'm not always great at following it myself & frequently have to go back & re-read in order to be sure I really understand what's going on.

The writing is strong and the characters are convincing (particularly Andrew Hale; nothing sells FUBAR like a super-spy scared shitless); in particular, the supernatural parts are done in a kind of "matte finish" that makes them feel eerily believable. In summary, I'd say it reads like Indiana Jones meets 007 meets Tom Clancy.

MaddAddam (MaddAddam #3), by Margaret Atwood

I always get nervous about the last book in a trilogy, but she did an amazing job with the wrap-up. Without spoiling anything, I can only say that back stories were filled in, characters beautifully fleshed out, loose ends artfully wrapped up, and the main story brought to a satisfying and poetic close. In retrospect, it's clear that the main themes of the series are storytelling, different viewpoints, whether a given action is heroic and noble vs utterly monstrous, and the interplay between all of those things. We do get a little bit of the ambivalent-relationships-between-women motif that is sort of MA's calling card, but it's side story rather than really thematic. Incredibly well-done.

The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam #2), by Margaret Atwood

In a way, "Year of the Flood" begins & ends in the same place as Oryx & Crake, but follows a different set of characters. The storytelling is still poetic, tight, & well-paced, & the characters are still dynamic & three-dimensional & interesting. I like how the difference in the POV characters is reflected in the narration between the two books (and within Year of the Flood as narration alternates between two very different characters). An excellent follow-up to O & C; I'm looking forward to seeing how she wraps it all up in MaddAddam.

Oryx & Crake (MaddAddam #1), by Margaret Atwood

I loved this book, which is not surprising since I have loved just about everything by Margaret Atwood I've ever read. It's slightly off the beaten path for her in that it doesn't deal primarily with complex / ambivalent / dark relationships between women, and I have to say that post-apocalypse sci-fi is definitely at the bottom of the list in terms of genres I'd expect her to try. Still, if someone was going to spin a completely original and unique post-apocalyptic yarn full of dynamic and interesting characters and masterful writing and straight-up nail it first time out of the gate, I'm not surprised it was her. Fantastic. Could not put it down.

Data: A Love Story, by Amy Webb

I enjoyed the hell out of this book. After two weeks of Perdido Street Station, I really needed to read something lighter and more simply entertaining, but still smart and interesting. "Data" totally fit the bill.

Quick summary - After months of truly horrific online dating & feeling pressured by her mother's terminal illness to find a life partner as soon as possible, newly 30 Amy Webb threw herself into "hacking" J-date using an awe-inspiring level of math, science, and color-coded spreadsheets (not to mention countless in-real-life hours spent remaking her physical appearance & presentation). To the shock of her skeptical friends and family, her experiment found her the perfect "1500 point" husband within a few months. (Not a spoiler - she includes the happy ending in the introduction.)

The topic may sound superficial, but if you are at all a mathy-codey-hacky-data-loving type of person, you very well may find a lot of her story fascinating. Absolutely, online daters will probably find it even more interesting (and informative), but I enjoyed it purely based on its existence at the weird intersection of statistics & sociology. No doubt, her methods struck me as creepy, desperate, unbalanced, and back-away-slowly-inducing at first, but then again, she got exactly the result she was after on the first try, and as her now-husband of eight years explains at one point, part of what charmed him about her extreme and highly calculating approach was that she'd figured out how to "out-think the problem" -- to dissect and then re-make a broken system in a way that worked for her, rather than just living with the default set-up when it clearly was not getting her the results she wanted.

Just a few quibbles:

• I am not generally someone who is bothered by cursing, but seriously. Every third word in the book is "fuck" / "fucking" / "fucker" / etc. It's the one thing that makes her writing come across at times as amateurish.
• Some of the side stories feel like unnecessary digressions. For example, I'm not sure how the story of how she went clothes shopping & ended up having a melt down in the Banana Republic dressing room really forwarded the main narrative.
• While the emphasis of her story is on the shrewd collection & analysis of online dating data & makeover of her digital self, there is some discussion of the real-life transformation she overtook as a result of her findings re: what the type of men she was interested in meeting found attractive, which in & of itself is fine. What felt a bit awkward to me was all the detail about how much time & money all that cost her -- a new wardrobe, six days a week at the gym, three days with a personal trainer, a $300 haircut, walking into a high-end cosmetics store & basically saying, "I need all-new make-up; I have lots of money to spend & am free til two," etc. Those details seem potentially alienating to the hopeful online daters out there who have to go to actual jobs for 8-10 hours a day & don't have oodles of disposable income.

Still, it was fabulously entertaining & educational, a quick & easy read, and I would imagine *incredibly* informative to anyone who's gotten disillusioned with the online dating scene.

Glasshouse, by Charles Stross

I am extremely picky about sci-fi, because a) I don't read enough of it to be "in" on a lot of the common language, so the made-up stuff often comes across as convoluted and confusing, and b) there is a lot lot LOT of terrible sci-fi out there that is terribly written & with no plot or believable characters to speak of. It took me a couple of chapters to get into "Glasshouse" (most of which covered the requisite "here's where / when we are & how stuff works"), but once the main story got going, it was interesting, creative (which I think is hard in sci-fi), full of dynamic & believable characters, and actually really funny at times. (I don't think it spoils anything to say that one of the main plot points early in the book is far-future people agreeing to be part of a sociology experiment where they're put into "ancient"--late 20th century--bodies & live "as the ancients" for a few years so that researchers can see how social interactions & relationships worked. Before the serious stuff goes down, this made for much hilarity without seeming like a gag.) A bit of a thriller & definitely keeps you interested in what happens next, but without getting so deathly serious that you feel like you need a nap afterward. Perfect if you want a bit of fun, engaging, interesting, well-written, not-too-creepy-&-weird sci-fi without a serious commitment.

The Night Circus, by Erin Morganstern

I loved this book! First & foremost I loved the style of the writing, so I hope we get another Erin Morgenstern release sometime in the not-too-dim-&-misty future because I will read the hell out of that. Without giving away too much plot I think this book is best described as Ray Bradbury meets Catherynne M. Valente -- beautifully poetic writing, descriptions that appeal to all of the senses, & nostalgic imagery, with a plot that is a sort of modern (well; late 19th century) fairy tale. The characters are carefully crafted and their relationships & interactions are believable and convincing while also subverting your expectations just enough to feel original & refreshing. It's so rare that a love story doesn't make me want to throw up a little, & Celia maybe the best written heroine I have read in a long, long time. I almost couldn't put this book down & that almost never happens to me.