My initial goal for this blog was to make a book review blog. Clearly, I completely failed at that, but to make up for that a little, I'm doing a year-end recap of what I read instead. Titles in bold were my favorites of the year and titles in italics were rereads.
Fiction
Paul Beatty, The Sellout - Absolutely brilliant satire and probably my favorite novel of the year. The social commentary is cutting and it was one of the funniest books I've ever read.
Chetan Bhagat, 2 States: The Story of My Marriage - It's a cliche to say that the book is the better than the movie, and generally I find that to be true. Adapting a novel that takes hours to read into into a two-hour film comes with obvious problems, with a major one being how to make an internal monologue work in a visual medium. The 2 States screenwriter's decision to dump the annoying Chetan Bhagat stand-in's internal monologue, along with some structural changes to the story, makes the movie significantly better than the book. Watch the movie, don't bother reading the book.
Jinwoo Chong, Flux
Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation - Chou wrote an essay which a lot of similar themes to the novel. Anyway, I read in an interview with Chou that her first drafts of the novel were her trying to be Paul Beatty. She said she ditched that, but I feel like you can still see the influence in the final product, which is a very good thing. Going by Goodreads reviews, I'm a bit of an outlier, but as someone who spends too much time reading Asian-American stuff, I thought this was hilarious and that Chou's satire had a 100% hit rate.
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human - Felt like I was obligated to read this as a longtime sadboi.
Hernan Diaz, Trust
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Central New Jersey literature! The first time I read was seven years ago or so, and I really enjoyed it then. The fun part about rereading it is that I barely remembered any of the specific plot points. Anyway, the third chapter has one of my favorite lines about New Jersey "Hypatia Belicia Cabral ... would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable long for elsewhere."
Farah Heron, Kamila Knows Best - This is what I was reading while I was crisscrossing New York throughout July in the midst of the literal and figurative heat of my apartment search. Anyway, even though I like movie romcoms, I don't ever read romance novels, but I enjoyed this! It's Emma, but with Ismaili Muslims in Toronto. It's not anything close to high literature, but Heron puts a fun spin spin on Austen's story. That being said, I've also enjoyed the other adaptions of Emma like Clueless and the 2020 movie, so me liking this is probably more of a credit to Austen plotting a great story more than anything else.
Deepti Kapoor, The Age of Vice
Toshikazu Kawaguchi trans. Emily Balistrieri, Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Yasunari Kawabata, Snow County
R.F. Kuang, Babel
R.F. Kuang, Yellowface - I feel like I sympathized with main character a little bit more than I should have. I liked both this and Babel, but would probably give the edge to Babel.
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake - This was the first book I read in 2023 so I wrote an actual post on it back when I thought that blogging was a New Year's resolution that I'd actually go through with.
Stefano Massini trans. Richard Dixon, The Lehman Trilogy - This is probably just a me thing, but one of the characters keeps on talking about going to SoHo to meet a Hungarian immigrant even though the story is set in the early 20th century and no one back then called that part of New York SoHo and it was a really annoying anachronism that kept on triggering me every time it showed up. Good novel though.
Tomihiko Morimi, The Tatami Galaxy
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Edwin O'Connor, The Last Hurrah
Cecilia Rabess, Everything's Fine - This was controversial for some reason and I still don't quite get why.
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus - There's probably some essay to be written about connections between Philip Roth and Junot Diaz - two guys writing about masculinity in New Jersey immigrant communities separated by a few decades.
Matthew Salesses, The Sense of Wonder
Asako Seriwaza, Inheritors
Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man - I read White Teeth a while ago, and I was underwhelmed and annoyed enough by it that I decided Zadie Smith was pretentious and not worth reading. At some point this year while she was on her press tour for The Fraud, I saw the description for The Autograph Man, which from what I understand is her least regarded novel, and decided it was intriguing enough for me to give it a chance. I'm so glad I did because I loved this and it made do a 180 on her! On a meta level, I loved how Smith did a complete swerve from writing something clearly based a lot on her own life in White Teeth to a completely different book heavily rooted in a religion and culture that isn't hers. And, a lot like with On Beauty, the empathy that she writes with is incredible - the main character in this book could've been written as the butt of a joke or as just another shitty, mediocre man, but she manages to make him a sympathetic figure. (It's probably telling on myself that I'm enthralled with how she writes neurotic men.) While I liked both this and On Beauty a lot, I give the slightest edge to The Autograph Man. There's a just type of love apparent whenever Smith is writing about London. I thought her Boston in On Beauty was great also, but even in that the few chapters in London really standout.
Zadie Smith, On Beauty - If The Autograph Man is Smith's least regarded novel, On Beauty is up there with White Teeth as her most regarded novel. For me, what was most memorable about On Beauty were the characters. I read this back in August, but all the Belseys and Kippses are still seared in my brain - Howard the hypocrite professor, Monty the conservative douchebag, Zora the pretentious gunner, Levi the wannabe, etc etc. It's also an interesting read from a historical perspective - as we currently go through a round of ridiculous media coverage on what's happening on prestigious campuses, it's worth remembering that this stuff has going on for a generation at this point and this book published 18 years ago still feels current. (As I sidebar, I would also like to thank Zadie Smith for getting me a first date off one of The Apps.)
Claire Tham, The Inlet
Leo Tolstoy trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Anna Karenina - Shockingly, Tolstoy is a good writer. I don't have anything interesting to say on the book itself, but it was an interesting experience reading it. I found in almost blind into one of The Classics of Literature to be putting myself in a weird place. On one hand, spoilers are abound everywhere - the introduction of the book assumes you know what happens so I had to skip it, online reviews assume you know everything, articles about Russia casually drop references that you didn't get before but now you kinda do because you started Anna Karenina, and it creates for a very different type of reading experience from reading newer novels. Anyway, I find classic novels like Anna Karenina to have this strange place in pop culture. They're not like Shakespeare, Greek myths, Biblical stories or the American high school canon where most educated Americans get the references to some extent, but at the same time, if you're reading articles about culture and politics, the writers of those have some expectation that you know what happened in books like Anna Karenina. All of this is to say, the next time I write about something that isn't distressed municipal debt, I will make some obtuse reference to Levin and the status of the 19th century Russia peasantry and assume that everyone understands it.
Vũ,Trọng Phụng trans. Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm and Peter Zinoman, Dumb Luck
Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon
Yan Lianke trans. Carlos Rojas, Hard Like Water - What if the absolute worst people you knew had a touching love story? A totally demented book in the best way possible.
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Nonfiction
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood - Joan Didion's happy twin who hates UCLA. Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to LA.
Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America - An interesting read, but I do not recommend reading about the history of dating as a way to deal with romantic angst.
Rafe Bartholomew, Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball - I liked this. As a sidebar, it's interesting how out of the four major North American American team sports, basketball, baseball and hockey did a decent job of taking off internationally, while American football remains a cultural quirk of ours.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight
Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community - Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to the Bay Area.
Thomas Curran, The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough - Normally, I hate self-help books, but this one took an interesting spin by choosing to blame capitalism and other structural features for why we're all perfectionists now.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz - Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to LA. Ironically, this summer I took a seminar on this book while I was in New York.
Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America - A Montenegrin guy saw me reading this in a bar and then proceeded to go on a 10-minute rant on topics that included topics such as UN's definition of poverty, the hippies being the greatest thing to even happen to America, and extreme weather events.
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea - It's provocative. It gets the people going.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Even after reading this, I'm not really convinced there is one. To be less snarky, Fisher brings up some interesting points on the connection between capitalism and our societal-wide decline in mental health.
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
Prachi Gupta, They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us - As I'm apt to do with book by the South Asian diaspora, I had a lot of contradictory and unsettled thoughts about this one which I'm still trying to comb through. This was sort of a prequel to an article that Gupta published a few years ago that I think is one of the best pieces written about South Asian American masculinity from a left-wing perspective, though that's also because it's one of the only pieces written about South Asian American masculinity from a left-wing perspective.
Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848 - One of my biggest intellectual surprises of 2023 was this 700-page tome on the history of antebellum America being the piece of media that changed me the most. It made me rethink how I view Christianity, how I view myself as a liberal/progressive, and honestly, how I view myself as an American. Being a second-generation American who doesn't have roots in the West, I've found myself over the years to have a tendency to want to divorce myself from American history, seeing it as something which is irredeemably ugly and exclusionary of me. And I find that a lot of liberal politics today is focused on trying to atone for America's past misdeeds, and that does have some appeal appeal to me. What I found powerful about reading this was that it made it easy for me to see a throughline from early 19th America to the views I have today, an idea of who my ideological forefathers are for lack of a better of term. The strange part about it is, as a contemporary American liberal, discovering that those forefathers are evangelical Protestants.
Hua Hsu, Stay True
Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World - Did you know that New York City ice cream trucks have turf wars? I did not.
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States - While I was reading this in the Newport PATH station, a guy came up to me and asked me about it. We're now friends. So basically, this book has contributed more to my social life in New York than hours of random classes, volunteering and networking events have.Daniel Knowles, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall - All five longtime readers of this blog know that I have a fascination with malls. One of the goals for 2024 is to write a big post about New York City malls inspired by this book because I find the history of their development and what they've become today to be absolutely fascinating in how they subvert so many ideas we have about malls. If you live in New York, I strongly recommend taking a subway trip to one of the outer-borough or urban New Jersey malls - I don't think you'll ever find another place on Earth which is so diverse.
Michael MacCambridge, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies
Ashoka Mody, India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today - There's been a glut of articles these past few years which are very positive on India's future economic prospects, and this is an important corrective.
H.V. Nelles, A Little History of Canada
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business - I'm too dumb to write anything meaningful about Postman, but absolutely vital reading.
Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
Nilakantan RS, South vs North: India’s Great Divide
Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality
Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Roger Simon, Philadelphia A Brief History
David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love - Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to the Bay Area.
