2012 Book Reviews

Last year's book contest with the BG, got me to wondering if I might be able to read 100 books this year. 81 was relatively easy, so it didn't seem like a big leap up to 100. I didn't want to give up the Economist or Entertainment Weekly, but I figured that I could assess progress after the first quarter and see if I wanted to or could push on towards the target. I've forgotten the exact number, and deleted the original Q1 library, but is was ahead of the goal, and I decided to go for it.

After the First Quarter, I started copying the titles, along with my notes on each text, into blog posts, and you can find those here with links to each title for Q2, Q3 and Q4. The complete 2012 library is also available here, but for convenience I've set out the titles below. I'm proud of the notes, though, because it's been challenging (and fun) to write reviews within the limit of 300 characters set by Google Books.

It's funny, looking back, how little I recall of certain books, and I'm having a hard time identifying a unifying theme or narrative thread for the year. I definitely read more children's books this year, mainly as a result of volunteering to lead a reading group in the BG's class.

I guess the most interesting thing in 2012 were the 19th century books, a period that I know relatively little about. I loved the President Garfield book (thank you Pat Fay), enjoyed the biography of president Harrison and the history of A&P (thank you chapel hill public library) and Taft 2012 (thank you Joy). I also really liked Hunter S. Thompson's coverage of the 1972 democratic primaries for Rolling Stone, about which I knew even less.

Of the three detective novels I read this year, I much preferred Chandler over Hammett, although all strained the levels of credulity.

Of the history/economics books, I liked 1493 better than 1491, mainly because the connections formed as a result of exploration are so fascinating. I also think I've read enough about the fishing industry for a while.

I was disappointed by most of the fiction, although I did enjoy the Lacuna, for its window into early twentieth century Mexico, and the Alice Munro for the beauty of her prose. Mrs. Dalloway was frightfully dull, and Pale Fire and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I found tedious and self-indulgent, each in their own way. But I tend toward non-fiction anyway, so take that for what it's worth.

I did not move on to Book II of either the Hunger Games or Game of Thrones, although I read both faster than anything else on the list, which says it all, in my view.

Nassim Taleb's new book was not as good as I'd hoped, although I do find myself quoting it often, and I do enjoy Matt Yglesias writing on zoning and other urban issues. Of the other economics books, I enjoyed their pervasive optimism for growth, although I didn't find any worthy of singling out here.

The final book I'll recommend is Stephen King's On Writing, which I found to be extremely insightful, as well as a poignant look at addiction and recovery.

For 2013, I envision more of the same, although I may watch a little more television and try to get to the movies more often. You can track what I've read for the year at this link. The first three things I'll be putting up there are Everything that Rises Must Converge (Thanks Worldwide), A Time of Gifts (Thanks Pat) and Wild Things (Thanks, Reading Group.)

Happy New Year!

Imagine: How Creativity Works	Jonah Lehrer
The Hunger Games	Suzanne Collins
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder	Evelyn Waugh
The Chesapeake Watershed: A Sense of Place and a Call to Action	Ned Tillman
Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created	Charles C. Mann
Lie Down in Darkness	William Styron
The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think	Matthew Yglesias
Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World	Sam Sommers
Holes	Louis Sachar
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business	Charles Duhigg
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption	Laura Hillenbrand
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty	Abhijit Banerjee,  Esther Duflo
The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town	Mark Kurlansky
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies	Jared M. Diamond
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President	Candice Millard
Gulliver's Travels	Jonathan Swift
War Horse	Michael Morpurgo
How We Decide	Jonah Lehrer
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness	William Styron
Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class	Katherine Porter
The Golden Compass Deluxe Edition	Philip Pullman
The Mysterious Benedict Society	Trenton Lee Stewart
The Maltese Falcon	Dashiell Hammett
The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America	Marc Levinson
Context	Cory Doctorow, Tim O'Reilly
Caribbean: A Novel	James A. Michener
The Thin Man	Dashiell Hammett
The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy	Matthew Stewart
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths	Michael Shermer
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters	Richard P. Rumelt
Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy	Joan Magretta
The textile industry in North Carolina: a history	Brent D. Glass
The Fix	Damian Thompson
The Amber Spyglass Deluxe Edition	Philip Pullman
The Subtle Knife: His Dark Materials	Philip Pullman
It's Not You, It's the Dishes: How to Minimize Conflict and Maximize Happiness in Your Relationship	Paula Szuchman, Jenny Anderson
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking	Susan Cain
Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life	Steven Landsburg
Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World	Brian Fagan
The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology	Lee Ross, Richard E Nisbett,
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success	Carol Dweck
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson	Hunter S. Thompson
A History of the Middle East: 3rd edition	Peter Mansfield
Shipping News: A Novel	Annie Proulx
Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century	Peter Edward Pope, Omohundro
Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon	Grace Lin
The Lacuna: A Novel	Barbara Kingsolver
Food Matters: a Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes	Mark Bittman
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft	Stephen King
influence: The Psychology of Persuasion	Robert B. Cialdini
The Daydreamer	Ian McEwan
The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills	Daniel Coyle
William Henry Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The 9th President,1841	Gail Collins
The Atomic Weight of Secrets: Or the Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black	Eden Unger Bowditch
The Call of the Wild	Jack London
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson
Some Great Thing	Lawrence Hill
Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food	Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World	Daniel Yergin
A Short History Of Progress	Ronald Wright
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey	Trenton Lee Stewart
The Numerati	Stephen Baker
Coffee with Shakespeare	Stanley Wells, Joseph Fiennes
Bone: Out from Boneville	Jeff Smith
A Game of Thrones	George R.R. Martin
Detroit: (a Biography)	Scott Martelle
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human	Jonathan Gottschall
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation	Steven Johnson
The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World	Michael Spence
Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection	A. J. Jacobs
Can You Trust a Tomato in January?	Vince Staten
The Long Goodbye	Raymond Chandler
Rickshaw reporter	George L. Peet
Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age	Steven Johnson
The Perks of Being a Wallflower	Stephen Chbosky
Death in Venice	Thomas Mann
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator	Ryan Holiday
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values	Robert M. Pirsig
Friend of My Youth	Alice Munro
The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table	Tracie McMillan
Public Opinion	Walter Lippmann
Taft 2012: A Novel	Jason Heller
The Cay	Theodore Taylor
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963	Kyla Brown
Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep	David K. Randall
The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963	Christopher Paul Curtis
Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order	Philip Coggan
The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World	Jacqueline Novogratz
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us	Daniel H. Pink
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think	Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
The Phantom Tollbooth	Norton Juster, Jules Feiffer
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves	Matt Ridley
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty	Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson
The One: The Life and Music of James Brown	RJ Smith
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong	Terry Teachout
An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies	Tyler Cowen
Earth and High Heaven	Gwethlyn Graham
Franny and Zooey	J. D. Salinger
Haircut and other stories	Ring Lardner
Candide	Voltaire
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less	Barry Schwartz