The best books I read in 2017

On my podcast, I close each conversation by asking my guest to recommend three books. Here, at the end of 2017, I thought I’d answer my own question, or at least a variant of it.

I shifted my reading heavily toward books this year. I needed to escape from the news cycle, from the social streams, from the shouting. This was a year when the volume of instant information was at its highest, but the quality of that information was, I think, unusually low. I’m not confident that anyone — least of all me — truly understands what’s happening in American or global politics right now. And yet we all want to understand it, we’re all desperate to understand it, and amid that emotional intensity, the number of notifications and alerts and articles and posts promising to tell us what’s going on has reached crazy-making levels.

And so I retreated to books. Some of them, as you’ll see here, were to better understand this moment by better understanding other moments. Some of them were to better resist the pressures of this moment, to change the way I was absorbing information, to fight the clamor of distractions. And some were to widen my own perspective, to remind me that there’s more going on right now than this administration, this moment in politics, this day of anger and outrage.

Here are a few I’d recommend.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Deep Work may be the only book I both read and reread this year. It’s an argument for focus in an age of distraction, but more than that, it’s a convincing argument for focus in an age of distraction. Newport’s core claim is that in an age when almost everyone is becoming more and more distracted, the returns to being able to wall yourself off from interruption — digital or otherwise — and concentrate on hard problems is becoming correspondingly more valuable.

Before reading Deep Work, I counted myself firmly on the side of informational overload; I found the arguments for boredom, for quiet, for calm, a bit nostalgic. Newport persuaded me I was wrong, that the experiment we’re running on our own brains and on our own attention spans is changing us for the worse, and that a big chunk of the future will belong to those who can train themselves to resist.

I had Newport on my podcast, and learned a lot from that conversation too. You can listen to it here:

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

The first sentence of this National Book Award finalist takes no prisoners. “History has failed us, but no matter,” writes Min Jin Lee.

I don’t read as much fiction as I should, and the pleasure I got from reading Pachinko only deepened that shame. The book tracks multiple generations of a Korean family living in Japan as they’re buffeted by war, bigotry, and the daily struggles of life. Even as I read that last sentence, I recognize that it’s the sort of recommendation that would make me think a book is Good and Important but probably a slog. Pachinko isn’t.

What’s more, it tracks the era in which Korea is sliced into halves, in which Koreans lose control of their own destiny, in which they are treated as pawns by the Americans and as subhuman by the Japanese, and is thus powerful context for today’s geopolitics.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman rewrote a bunch of Norse myths. I don’t really know what more I need to say to recommend this.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

According to my Kindle, I have 115 highlights and seven notes in this book. That’s a highlight or note every three pages or so. And I’m not surprised. This was the strangest, most thrilling book I read this year.

Lanier coined the term “virtual reality,” founded one of the first companies in the space, and had a hand in many of the key research and product innovations in the field. The book is structured partly as a memoir, partly as a series of essays, and partly as a series of imagined dialogues. It offers a new definition of “virtual reality” every few pages, and every single one of them is interesting.

It is designed to expand your view of what VR could and should be, to see it as less of a gaming system and more as a way to experience radically different forms of existence, movement, communication, and creation. It offhandedly includes stories that could be a book in themselves — like the time Lanier trip-sat a dying Richard Feynman as he tried LSD for the first time.

Above all, the book is an opportunity to be inside Lanier’s mind for 300-some pages. It’s an opportunity you shouldn’t miss, one that fits at least a few of Lanier’s definitions of VR.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen and Barbara Fields

This is a brilliant book. It’s a series of essays, lectures, and dialogues between or by sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields. (This is usually where I’d write “no relation,” but actually, they’re sisters.) The various sections track the ingenuity and invention that goes into the design of racialized ideas, words, and actions. It’s a book about how social constructs are constructed, about the assumptions and power that lurk inside concepts that have come to seem natural yet are anything but:

Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race, as just defined, so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss. Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color” — a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.

You should read Racecraft. Everyone should read Racecraft.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev

“The new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did,” writes Peter Pomerantsev. “It will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment.”

Thus begins Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. Like many of my favorite books this year, it’s a bit difficult to describe. It’s a memoir of Pomerantsev’s time as a reality television producer in Russia, but it’s also built out of an investigation into a supermodel’s death, and a recounting of a particularly remarkable party, and much more besides. It’s a book of media criticism as much as it is political commentary, and it’s a book about how in certain places at certain times, the two become indistinguishable. It’s a book that often feels like dystopic science fiction, but it comes at a time when the dystopic has become more recognizable than the mundane.

You’ll notice that this list has not yet had many books about contemporary American politics. We are too far outside our norms, too far down a path that too few of us even realized we were traveling, for us to see its meaning yet. And so I’ve been searching for insight in books about other places, other times, other worlds. This is one of the books that I found most helpful.

“The lies are told so often that after a while you find yourself nodding because it’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly,” Pomerantsev writes, “and at some level you feel that if [they] can lie so much and get away with it, doesn’t that mean they have real power, the power to define what is true and what isn’t?”

He is writing about Russia, or at least he was.

The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

When you think of Woodward and Bernstein, you think of All the President’s Men, their account of the Watergate investigation that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation (and to a movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman). But I think their book The Final Days is actually better and, for this era, more useful.

The Final Days is what it sounds like: a deeply reported narrative of Nixon’s final days in office. It’s a remarkable achievement. Woodward and Bernstein, the journalists most responsible for exposing Watergate and destroying the Nixon administration, also produced the richest inside account of what it was like for Nixon’s staffers to live through the exposé and its aftermath. I cannot imagine what it took for Woodward and Bernstein to persuade some of these people to talk to them.

The Final Days is an account of a White House staff serving an increasingly irrational, embittered, and embattled president who wasn’t telling them, or possibly even telling himself, the truth. It’s about how people justify serving a man who long ago should have lost their loyalty. It’s about the deals that people make with themselves in that situation, the rationalizations they offer, the stories they choose to believe. It’s about how duty to country, anger at perceived enemies, loyalty to those around you, and fear of what would happen if you left can combine to create a rational structure around an irrational leader. And it’s about how easily history could’ve turned out differently, how possible it is to imagine a world in which Nixon, with the help of his staff, had survived Watergate.

Why did I read this book this year? Oh, no reason.

Young Radicals by Jeremy McCarter

Young Radicals, Jeremy McCarter writes, “is about what happens when the world, which had seemed to be spinning rapidly in the direction of peace and social progress, falls to pieces. It’s about reaching out to grasp the new America that seems to be drawing near — freer, more equal, more welcoming — and having America try to break your hand.”

The book begins in the 1910s, and it follows a handful of, well, young radicals, as they navigate one of America’s truly head-snapping decades. The cast of main characters includes liberals, communists, suffragettes, and artists. Each of them is an idealist at a moment when idealism seems appropriate. Each of them, in their own ways, is soon to have that idealism dashed, as America enters World War I, as the Spanish flu rips through the world, as communism unfurls its horrors, as the forces of social change generate their crushing, violent backlash.

Many a social reformer has held fast to the idea that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. This book drains that phrase of its comfort without draining it of its power or even, potentially, its truth. What is remarkable, following the stories in Young Radicals, is to realize that the horrors these men and women would live through — horrors that were genuinely cataclysmic in their scale — somehow coexisted with the eventual spread of peace, prosperity, and equality in the 20th century.

This book is reminder that things can go truly, terribly wrong, and they can do so quickly. It insists that we rediscover a tragic imagination, that we put aside our pat stories of the 20th century and face up to what it was like to live through the 20th century, to die in the 20th century.

But it’s also a reminder that as depressing as 2017 has been, we have seen far, far worse. The task before us is to make sure we don’t descend back into those depths.

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