2020 – Memorable Books
In 2020 I read ~30 books, which is roughly the same as 2019. Overall I really enjoyed what I've read, and here are some of the standouts from the year.
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings have been a really eye-opening tour the evolutionary forces behind emotions. Evolutionary biology feels really underrated by the general public. It's one of the only fields that supplies actual causes as opposed to proximate causes (or worse, just platitudes) for understanding emotions, and this book goes into rigorous detail on the actual causes of emotions, negative and positive. 10/10, would recommend to people who felt negative emotions at some point (or actually, feel them a bit more often than they would like).
I first read So Good They Can't Ignore You six years ago, and again about three years ago, so I guess my rereading of it this year falls into a general pattern. Despite actually disliking the book when I first read it, I've really come around to enjoying it. I think the book is quite original in pointing out weaknesses in the “follow your passion” vein of advice, and I've found the book's view of the job market to be one of the most clear out of anything career-related books I've read. I gave it a 9/10, only wishing for a bit more scientific rigor when it comes to presenting evidence.
I'm only halfway through The Mind Illuminated, a meditation guide with a program that takes a few month to years to go through. However, I'm already constantly amazed that this book even managed to exist. The author is an expert in both modern neuroscience and multiple ancient meditation traditions, which means that there's an anomalous amount of scientific rigor in a usually spiritual subject. Somehow, the book also manages to be excellent at teaching so far, which is completely baffling given that it would be extremely difficult to write about troubles experienced by beginning meditators from the perspective of an advanced meditator. Maybe I'll be more critical after I finish the book, but it feels like a tiny miracle so far, and I really like the fact that it talks about meditation in concrete terms, as opposed to vague spiritual ones.
The Left Hand of Darkness was the favorite fantasy book I've read this year, beating out the likes of Harry Potter, The Three Body Problem trilogy, and The Handmaid's Tale. Left Hand is a strange book to hold that distinction – it doesn't have surprising plot, nor hard sci-fi, and the setting isn't particularly appealing either. It's success is even surprising to its author:
Left Hand looked to me like a natural flop. Its style is not the journalistic one that was then standard in science fiction, its structure is complex, it moves slowly, and even if everybody in it is called he, it is not about men. That's a big dose of “hard lit,” heresy, and chutzpah, for a genre novel by a nobody in 1968.
What The Left Hand of Darkness does have is a deep understanding of a fundamental concept of human society:
The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ....there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethenian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards 'him' a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the interactions between persons of the same or opposite sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran.
The book explores that concept in a way that I'm not sure I've seen in media. In serious sci-fi and fantasy you can often categorize the writing as being a combination of sarcastic, critical, or cerebral. This book doesn't really read like that. It feels like the entire world, from the scope of civilizations to the scope of the most personal interactions were built from the ground up. The result was that at after the novel, I felt like I was rudely reawaken to a culture and a psychology dominated by the importance of gender. The book takes a bit getting into, but is a easy 10/10, and will probably be one of my favorite books of all time.
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Categorized under: #reading