What I Read in January 2020
Two unusual things have happened so far in 2020.
First, I’ve finished reading five books. I don’t know the last time I read five books in a single month.
Second—and more unusual—is that 80% of those books were non-fiction. Is this the kind of thing that happens in your early-to-mid-30s? You go from reading exclusively fiction in your 20s to testing the waters with some longreads and podcasts and soon you get that Audible credit and pick up a Michael Lewis book and suddenly you can’t remember the last time you read a novel?
The third unusual thing hasn’t happened yet but it’s what I’m trying to make happen right now. I would like to start blogging, regularly, about what I read.
The best book blogging I’ve ever read isn’t a literal blog but it reads like one: Nick Hornby’s monthly column in The Believer, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” I know I’m not Nick Hornby and so I’d like to avoid trying to replicate his approach too closely. He never named the books he disliked by name, a tendency that doesn’t benefit anyone. He also catalogued the books he bought, which I don’t think needs to go in here. But I would like to catalogue books read, books attempted and, as appropriate, books abandoned. All of these will be listed at the end of each blog post. I especially want to pay more attention to how many books I’m reading at any given time, because the answer is usually too many. (I have started tracking the books I am reading accurately on my Goodreads page for the first time, as seen here.)
The Books Themselves
Before discussing the books, here’s a list of them:
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
The Moviegoer by Walter Percy
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
Those were the books finished. Then there are the other books.
Books Partially Read:
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez
The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
The Stories of John Cheever
None of this list qualifies as “abandoned”, at least not yet. These are all books I intend to finish reading, whether in February or somewhere farther away. They will only be mentioned briefly below, if at all, while I discuss the books I did finish reading.
On Non-Fiction
This non-fiction spree can be traced to a few root causes. One of these is my commute. Another is my Audible membership. A third is my Kindle. No, this is not an ad for Amazon and its products, but there is something immensely convenient and satisfying about being able to pair an audiobook with its ebook companion. This is how I read three of the books I read this month: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.
I’ve read other books this same way, in the past. I think the first book I read in this style was The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin.
Some people will tell you that to listen to an audiobook is not to read a book. That if you’ve listened to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men an an audiobook, you have never read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I don’t agree with this blanket statement but I think that it’s true for some. There are those who consume audiobooks, rather than read them, in much the same way podcasts or headlines are consumed. They listen to audiobooks on 2x speed, capturing themes but not details.
I think that, when I listen to an audiobook, I am reading a book. I give it my full attention. I am not scrolling through my phone or looking at my laptop or reading a magazine if an audiobook is on. I only listen to them in certain contexts: doing dishes, shoveling snow, walking to the store, commuting to work, driving in general. It’s multi-tasking, but not a form of multi-tasking that requires my brain to do two competing activities. Because these multi-tasking moments come in short spurts, this is part of the preference for non-fiction audiobooks. It needs to be something that I can absorb in pieces, without getting too emotionally involved. Something intriguing without being riveting. It’s why Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a book I have not yet finished reading, because I downloaded it as an audiobook and often find it to be an odd choice to pair with chores around the house or idling in traffic.
The other launching-off point for this non-fiction began with GQ’s “Chaos at the Top of the World”, an article about the long lines plaguing Mount Everest every May and the viral photo that makes climbing Mount Everest look less like an adventure and more like an awful Sunday lost to Ikea. (I hate going to Ikea and haven’t been there in years.)
To think that the same people who disdain the DMV probably love Everest
The article fascinated me but also drew my attention to a gap in my own reading history:
Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air made famous the May 1996 disaster during which eight climbers—caught in a blinding whiteout—perished from exposure or plunged to their death. The book was a tale of the vicissitudes of nature, the hubris of climbers, and the ineffable lure of the mountain, as well as a reminder that, though Everest had been summited by hundreds, it remains an incredible and dangerous challenge. It was also a scathing portrait of irresponsible guides catering to wealthy, out-of-their-depth dilettantes who were floundering around in what had become an increasingly commercialized enterprise. It was greeted as a wake-up call.
But two decades on, the Everest experience often seems to have devolved even further into a circus-like pageant of stunts and self-promotion.
I finished the GQ article but wanted more of whatever it was the article was offering. I felt a morbid curiosity to better understand what exactly happens on Mount Everest and why people choose to go up there and, in some cases, die up there. It seemed I had no choice but to read Into Thin Air.
I read the book in a matter of days. It’s a quick read and the first thing I read in 2020. The only thing I’d previously read by Krakauer was Into the Wild, which left me with the impression that Jon Krakauer is a narcissist with very little self-awareness. Into Thin Air made me like the guy a little more, but I did still have some lingering questions at the end of it:
Why would anyone climb Mount Everest?
Is Jon Krakauer a jerk?
Were his fellow survivors offended by his book?
Did he suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after these events
Was writing Into Thin Air a form of therapy for Krakauer?
From here, I read a few things on the internet: the Wikipedia page for Into Thin Air, the Wikipedia page for Jon Krakauer, several interview with Jon Krakauer, and President Barack Obama’s list of his best books of 2019.
President Obama’s lists are always impressive. After Into Thin Air, I went to his list to find more non-fiction. I wanted something else exciting, educational, compelling. I found it with Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
My Personal Rules for True Crime Consumption
At this point, I should clarify that I have a general distaste for two things: podcasts and true crime. Say Nothing on audiobook comes dangerously close to being both of those things.
It’s not that I dislike all podcasts. When they’re good, they’re good. I like The Moth, This American Life, Radiolab, Corridor Cast and anything that involves Eric Andre or Tim Heidecker. I have listened to a few episodes of Chapo Trap House and found it entertaining. Unfortunately, a lot of podcasts are meandering, self-gratifying exercises in personal brand.
My issue with true crime is that it usually seems distasteful. Human tragedy packaged as entertainment. Murder, but fun.
My personal rule for true crime is that I won’t consume any true crime narrative that doesn’t have the cooperation of the victim’s family. It’s a good way to immediately disqualify most of the popular options, things like Serial or My Favorite Murder or Netflix’s Watch This Guy Murder Cats and Then a Person.
Say Nothing dodges those issues by being a work of longform investigative journalism about both an unsolved murder and history of Northern Ireland. In particular, the Troubles and the Irish Republican Army. It passes my two rules for true crime: it’s not about murder jokes (I don’t know if there’s a moment of levity in the entire book) and it was written with plenty of cooperation from various victims, particularly the children of Jean McConville, a woman murdered in Northern Ireland in 1972.
Say Nothing wasn’t only on President Obama’s 2019 books list. It was on a lot of lists, including another that I sourced some reading material from: The Economist’s “Our books of 2019”.
Elitism etc
This list is what led me to Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas. Unlike Say Nothing and Into Thin Air, Winners Take All does not have one over-arching narrative that ties it together. It is not the story of one particular tragedy or event. Instead, it’s the story of, as The Economist so succinctly puts it, “philanthrocapitalism” and the “supposedly do-gooding companies merely offer[ing] sticking-plaster solutions to social problems that they have helped create.”
Winners Take All is a worthwhile read, one that I recommend to anyone and everyone. During the book’s best sections, Giridharadas discusses the distinction between thought leaders like Simon Stenek or Malcolm Gladwell and the increasingly endangered public intellectual. I found it personally gratifying, as working in the world of digital marketing tosses a lot of thought leaders in my bubble of awareness and Giridharadas efficiently dissects and exposes many of their worst tendencies.
The book does have some aspects I don’t care for. He regularly refers to “elites” and “globalists” and spends the entire book referring to something he has labeled as MarketWorld. He defines MarketWorld as:
An ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.
This is a good concept, and an important one, but the fixation with this term—MarketWorld—and its permeation through the book can become a distraction and starts to give the book a needless opacity. The author refers to “the citizens of MarketWorld” and then becomes fixated on what he refers to as “the protocols.” The book establishes such an internalized form of jargon that you end up with good ideas being garbled into sentences like: “Hinton saw how the protocols, redeployed to the war on hardship, could be very useful to MarketWorld.”
Between protocols and globalists and elites and MarketWorld, the book can be exhausting and, at times—especially with word choices like “City of London banker elites” thrown in—it could be tempting to believe some kind dog-whistling is happening, in the style of an alt-right podcaster. Taken as a whole, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all, but the frequent references to protocols and elites seem tone-deaf when considered alongside the history of those words being used in contexts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the rantings of men like Glen Beck or D____ T____.
The book did provide me with a history of philanthropism I had never known or considered. It’s something I intend to learn more about, especially considering my history of doing fundraising for a non-profit for the first four years of my adult working life. Andrew Carnegie’s affect on America’s view of equality, industry, and philanthropy is not something I’d ever taken the time to learn about.
Less Elitism, Fewer Grammatical Errors
While we’re on the topic of elitism: Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English is the fourth non-fiction book I read during the month of January. Like Winners Take All, I simultaneously recommend that everyone read it and think it has some major flaws.
Like many contemporary grammarians, Benjamin Dreyer seems deeply committed to pedantry—but only the pedantry that he believes in. He’ll range from arguing for an obscure grammar rule that you’ve certainly never heard of, while also arguing that only a snob is precious about the word “hopefully.”
The best part about Dreyer’s English is that (I think) it inspired me to write better. It even inspired a challenge at our office to stop using the following words in our writing:
Very
Rather
Really
Quite
So
Just
In Fact
Of Course
That Said
Pretty
Surely
Actually
Clearly
Almost
Utilize
I will probably have to write more about the challenge of going without those words. At the very least, I’m confident that avoiding them is making me a better writer. Which means that Dreyer’s English, even if it frustrated me, has made me a better writer. (And considering that the author a) brags about the importance of his station as a copy editors and b) name drops throughout the book, yes, it is a frustrating book.)
What makes a novel significant?
Now, finally, is a good time to mention the one novel I read in the month of January: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. I cannot help but think that I did not understand what makes this such an important novel. I wish I’d been assigned it in high school or college and that I’d been forced to learn what makes it so significant because I simply don’t think I understood it. Or at least not all of it.
It’s not to say I didn’t like it. This is one of those books that I’m relieved I didn’t abandon. I wondered, for the first hundred pages or so, why I was reading it and what made it so significant. Why it won the National Book Award. Why the title was The Moviegoer. What it was even about.
I think the best way to sum up my response to The Moviegoer was to say: “Huh.”
And then—something no one could have done when it first came out, when it first became an important, significant novel—to look up on the internet why it matters. I found this New Yorker article and this Atlantic article, neither of which really explained anything to me, because I’m not sure that there is anything to explain.
What I did know, at the end of The Moviegoer, was that it left me wanting to do one thing: to write. Which is what brought me here, to this blog post, and which probably makes this as good a stopping point as any.
Stay tuned to learn what I read in the month of February!