Category: books

My Story of Civilization

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i.

A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read.

It was through Isaac Asimov’s autobiography that I first discovered Will Durant, sometime in 1995. In In Memory Yet Green, Asimov wrote about how in the summer of 1945 he was about to leave the house for a meeting with his draft board:

I was reading a copy of Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ, the third volume of his history of civilization and Gertrude was ironing some clothes. The radio stopped its regular programming for an emergency bulletin: The United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Asimov added a footnote to this passage about Durant’s series:

I read each volume as it came out. After I had read the first one and heard he was planning a multivolume history–five volumes was the original plan–I felt worried. I knew he was in his forties and I carefully noted in my diary that I hoped he would live long enough to complete the set. He did.

(I’ve had similar worries about Robert A. Caro, hoping he will live long enough to finish the final volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson.)

I read the books slightly out of order:

I was certain I’d read Our Oriental Heritage first, and was surprised to see it second on the list. I dug into some old diaries to affirm my memory, and sure enough, I was right–sort of. On May 4, 1999, I wrote:

Finished Fact and Fancy this morning and started right in on Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his “Story of Civilization.” The book is 440,000 words long… it will take me about 21 days to finish the book…

So why is Life of Greece first on the list? It turns out, I never finished that initial attempt to read Our Oriental Heritage and I don’t count a book on my list if I don’t finish it. I didn’t finish it because shortly after I started it, I began taking flying lessons and I set most of my reading aside for a time to focus on flying airplanes.

As I read the last lines of Napoleon, I tried and failed to remember when and how I first obtained the books. Back to the diary I went, and found that I bought my first Durant books on April 10, 1999:

Late in the afternoon I drove over to the Iliad Bookshop where I bought 3 used volumes of Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization” series for just under $20. The volumes I got were The Life of Greece (Vol II); The Age of Faith (Vol IV); and The Renaissance (Vol VII)

When did I get Our Oriental Heritage? It had to have been before May 4, 1999. Some more digging and, much to my surprise, I found the following on April 19, 1999:

Grandpa called tonight–he said he had a surprise for me–and then proceeded to tell me he picked up Vols, I, III, and VI of Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” series for me at a used bookshop in Nyack.

Between May 4, 1999 and the day I finished the final volume of the series, 9,063 days elapsed, or 24 years, 9 months and 28 days. The series tops off around 13,000 pages, which puts it somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million words. That’s a lot of reading. In fact, it turns out there were years in which the total amount I read was less than 13,000 pages, as the chart below indicates (the red dashed line shows 13,000 pages).

I never read more than two of the volumes in a single year, reading one in 2000, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2019. I read two volumes in 2020, 2022 and 2024. Of the 11 volumes, I’ve read two of them twice: The Life of Greece and Caesar and Christ.

ii.

As Asimov mentioned, the Durants’ original plan was for five books. The scope increased with each successive volume until their tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, published in 1967, in which they concluded with the following envoi:

This is the concluding volume of that Story of Civilization to which we devoted ourselves in 1929, and which has been the daily chore and solace of our lives ever since[Ellipsis] We shall not sin at such length again; but if we manage to elude the Reaper for another year or two we hope to offer a summarizing essay on “The Lessons of History”.

True to their word, they did write The Lessons of History, published in 1968 (which I read in 2019, and of which I have a signed copy). Then Rousseau and Revolution won the Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, and I imagine that, coupled with what must have seemed like boredom to the globe-trotting Durants, decided them to head back to the typewriter for one more volume, The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975.

I can’t read a magnum opus like this without wanting to know more about the people who spent a lifetime working on such a project. This happened to me when I read Dumas Malone’s 6-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson; I followed it up with a biography of Dumas Malone, Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson by William C. Hyland, Jr. And when I finished everything that Robert A. Caro has written thus far, I followed it up with his book Working .

It was, therefore, natural for me to read Will & Ariel Durant’s A Dual Autobiography several years ago. Not only was it an interesting read, but it gave fascinating insights into how such a massive effort was made in times long before computing. Ariel Durant described some of the research process:

It took me some time to realize how important a role was played in a book by the organization of the material, and how the same contents less wisely arranged might have led to repetition, confusion, and failure. ==The mere organization (as distinct from gathering) of the material was the most back-breaking part of the total operation==. Will undertook the initial part. As he explained it to me, he divided the book into chapters, generally following geographical order (Near East, India, China, Japan), and within each region, mediating between chronological sequence and topical unity (economics, government, religion, language, literature, philosophy, etc.). Then he marked with a Roman numeral each of the approximately thirty thousand slips that had been gathered for Volume I, according to the chapter to which it belonged…

[Will Durant] prepared and typed, for each chapter in turn, an outline consisting of several hundred headings, consecutively numbered with Arabic numerals. Then he presented to the family and his other aides the slips that he had assigned to Chapter I, together with the chapter outline; and our task was to read each slip and to number it according to the heading under which we judged it belonged. We estimate an average chapter of Story used some fifteen hundred slips, or about thirty thousand per volume; our attic rooms are bulging with the boxes of used slips.

Of those “slips” that Ariel Durant describes, she has said the following:

Usually we read about five hundred volumes for each of our books. I don’t mean to say that we read these books aloud to each other, but we do read them at approximately the same time, discuss them, and make notes. The hundreds of cards in this file are some of the notes relating to Volume 10.

And that is only a part. We have a thousand notes in the typewritten form in galley sheets. Every note we take from our readings includes the name of the book, the author, and the page from which it was taken. The scissored slips are placed exactly where they belong in the detailed outline of our chapter.

This seems a remarkably similar precursor to Ryan Holiday’s notecard system, which just goes to show that history is constantly repeating itself, one of the many lessons that is made clear by the Story of Civilization.

The Durants began researching the books in 1929 and they finally finished in 1975–a forty-six year span of enormous work. That they were able to do this project at all is due to another book Will Durant wrote before The Story of Civilization. He wrote The Story of Philosophy in the 1920s and it was bestseller that helped put him and Simon & Schuster on the map, and allowed the Durants the financial freedom to pursue their research for Story around the world.

iii.

Any history of the scope that the Durants present will be marred with errors and omissions. Like any diligent, self-aware researchers, the Durants acknowledgedf these imperfections. In writing about prehistoric India in Our Oriental Heritage, he said:

Recent researches have marred this comforting picture–as future researches will change the perspective of these pages.

About half of Our Oriental Heritage was dedicated to the history of Indian, Japanese, and Chinese civilizations. I wished for more. I read somewhere that the Durants had planned editions on North and South American native civilizations as well, but the existing scope exceeded the time that life and energy provided them. In my imagination, I wonder at the volumes they might have produced on Aztec or Mayan civilization, or the native cultures and civilizations that predated European arrival into the new world. These Durant-authored volumes are left to my imagination.

They wrote about what most interested them and it was a fortunate coincidence that many of their interested and mine overlapped. I forgive their errors and omissions as the result of an enormous amount of work and research performed not my an army but by two mortal adults and a handful of helpers. I have to feel this way. In my own work, I recognize the scope of the work I do (writing code, managing projects) inevitably leaves gaps, bugs, and room for improvement.

iv.

What makes these books the best histories I’ve ever read? I think it is a combination of three things: scope, continuity, and the writing.

From the beginning, Durant attempted to write an “integral” history. As he wrote in the preface to the first volume:

I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections–economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history of music, the history of art–does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways.

Fortune prepared me for this method. I attended a humanities magnet high school in Los Angeles in which our core classes were constructed in a similarly integral way, with courses on philosophy, literature, social institutions, and art history, tied together against a similar backdrop in time. The scope of Durants volumes is vast and varied and because of it, I learned more about subjects that I never imagined I’d be interested in, and yet found them all fascinating. Despite the length of the volumes, there wasn’t a dull moment. And the integral method made clear the contemporaneousness of the history, science, art, music, religion, philosophy. Each discipline feeds each other in an intricate web that isn’t always obvious in longitudinal sections.

The volumes also provided continuity in a way that I had not previously experienced reading or studying history. It is a continuity that creeps up on your as you make your way through the pages. We begin with the shadowy prehistoric times without individuals, but rather individual remains of anonymous ancestors in the days before civilization and by the end of the 11th volume, we are dealing with detailed biographies of historic figures (Napoleon, Tallyrand, Thomas Jefferson) who are not many generations removed from ourselves. And yet, after the first 100 introductory pages of the first volume, there was never a sudden jump, never a rapid leap forward in time. Things moved smoothly from past-to-present. That continuity provided a unique insight into human history for me. It was as if I watched as people in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur tapped their successive generation shoulder, and that generation tapped the next and soon we were in Egypt, and Babylonia, and so on down to Louis XVI and Samuel Johnson. This continuity gave me a perspective of history that I hadn’t had before, and I’m not sure such a perspective is possible without the scope the Durants achieved in these volumes. There is a kinship that forms with those dead thousands of years, as when an ancient Sumerian tablet reads, “the city, where the tumult of man is.”

Continuity highlights repetition. Consider Edmund Burke writing on democracy in the ancient world, and in the modern:

Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities.

Finally, there is the writing, the voice, the erudite guide that carries you through thousands of years of human triumph and misery. Durant has an elegant, old-world style in which his premises come at the end of a paragraph rather than the beginning, often with witty charm, as when he writes of the toilers of Babylonia:

Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for the artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle. [Emphasis mine.]

That voice sets the tone of the entire series. The Durants come across as true companions, and I think Durant knew this. In the last words of the penultimate volume in the series, Durant wrote:

We thank the reader who has been with us these many years for part or all of the long journey. We have ever been mindful of his presence. Now we take our leave and bid him farewell.

I was overcome by a strange set of emotions upon finishing the final volume. Here I’d walked with Roman emperors and Japanese peasants. I’d seen battles fought in the desert, and averted by the random passing of the moon across the face of the sun. I’d spent hours with the greatest thinkers, artists, creators, and inventors. I’d lived thousands of lifetimes in the pages of these books, and now they were all over. It was a bittersweet conclusion. I was reminded of a verse (quoted in Rousseau and Revolution) by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. In the margins, I jotted: “An apt epitaph to the Durants’ adventure.”

Lo, I have reached my goal! The stirring thought
Thrills through my spirit. Thine all powerful arm,
My Lord, my God, alone hath guided me
By more than one dark grave, ere I might reach
That distant goal! Thou, Lord, hast healed me still,
Hast shed fresh courage o’re my sinking heart,
Which held with death its near companionship;
And if I gazed on terrors, their dark shapes
Soon disappeared, for thou protectedst me!
Swiftly they vanished.–Savior, I have sung
Thy covenant of Mercy. I have trod
My fearful path! My hope has been in Thee!

In the end, the Durants’ volumes reinforced a truth my mother told me when I was five or six years old: books can take you anywhere.

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The Year of the Long Book

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2024 is turning out to be the Year of the Long Book, for me at least. I generally set myself a goal of 100 books a year, but that arbitrary. Some books are barely 100 pages, while others are over 1,000 pages. The goal of 100 books loomed large in my head for a time, but more and more, I’m less concerned with how many books I read than enjoying the book I do manage to finish, and learning all I can from them

I was thinking about this because this morning, Goodreads reminded me that I was 6 book “behind schedule.” I wondered about that. Why was I behind schedule? It turns out that the books I’ve read so far this year have been longer books.

What is a long book? Regular readers are aware that I have been keeping a list of all of the books I’ve finished reading since 1996. In the decades that I’ve kept my list, I’ve had to deal with fact that some years I read more books than others. This is true even when it seems I spend the same amount of time reading year-to-year. To that end, I’ve developed a measurement that I call “BEq,” or “book equivalent.” Over the 28-years of my list, the average length of a book I’ve read is 410 pages. I set 1.0 BEq equal to 410 pages. If I read s 300 page book, that is 300/410, or 0.73 BEq. If I read a 950 page book that is 950/410 = 2.32 BEq. I consider a “short” book to be 1 standard deviation below the average, or 0.46 BEq. I consider a long book to be 1 standard deviations above the average, or 1.57 BEq.

Here is a chart showing the average BEq by year. Darker bars are years in which the average BEq is greater than 1.0:

Chart of BEq over time from 1996 to 2024

So far, this year, the average BEq is 1.26. That is still my defined BEq for a long book of 1.57, but it is the second highest average BEq I’ve had in 28 years. (For the average BEq for a year to be over 1.57, it means I would have need to have read much longer books.)

What are these long book that I’ve been reading this year? At the time of this writing, I’ve finished 11 books. Of those 11 books, about a third are “long” books by my definition:

These four books along total 8.17 BEq, or an average of 2.04 BEq: that is, the equivalent of reading 2 books for every one book I read.

In addition, I am currently making my way through 3 long books. (I don’t count books in-progress on my list. I have to finish a book before it goes on the list;) These are:

All of these books are well over my defined length for a long book. Combined, they average 2.33 BEq. And this trend doesn’t look like it is stopping any time soon. The last of these book, Rousseau and Revolution is the penultimate book in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization series. Up next on my list is the final book, The Age of Napoleon, which, at 872 pages, is 2.13 BEq. If you factor all these in for 2024, then my average BEq for the year is 1.49 — very close to the 1.57 BEq mark for long books. So far, then, 2024 is the year of the long book.

There is something about long books that I find irresistible. Maybe it is because I choose these books carefully, and more often than night, they are great reads and I never want them to end. The fact that they are long means I can savor them for a longer period of time. And ultimately, savoring one book is more important to me than reading 50 of them.

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My Best Reads of 2023

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I read 101 books in 2023. I also read around 300 feature articles in magazines. What follows is my top 10 best book reads of 2023 and some of my favorite articles of 2023. For those interested in more details of my overall reading for 2023, see the section that follow this which summarizes my reading for 2023.

My Favorite Books for 2023

1. Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb

I have to admit that I didn’t know who Robert Gottlieb was at the start of 2023, although I’ve read several of the books he has edited. Then, in July, I came across a documentary called Turn Every Page about the relationship between Robert A. Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb. It was a great documentary, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb. I’ve read all of Caro’s books (indeed, I’ve recently acquired a personalized signed copy of his short book, Working) and I’m always fascinated by people who make a single subject their life’s work (see also: Will Durant and Dumas Malone). After watching the documentary, I searched for books by Gottlieb and discovered he’d written a memoir, Avid Reader: A Life.

Not since reading Isaac Asimov’s 3-volume autobiography have I come across such a detailed inside look at the book publishing world. It was a delightful, fascinating read that spoke to me on many levels. I think of myself as an avid reader, but I am lazy in comparison to Gottlieb. I didn’t want the book to end, and when it finally ended, I did something I’ve done only one other time in the 28 years I’ve been keeping my reading list: I immediately started the book over and read it a second time. And you know what, it was even better on the second go-around. It was, hands down, my favorite read of 2023.

2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Years ago, Kelly and I went to a local performance of Les Mis. I don’t remember much about it, but the book, Les Miserables, has always intrigued me for its size and popularity. I decided to give it a try in the spring. I found that almost from the first page, I couldn’t put the book down. It had a bit of everything, and it was fascinating. I loved the non-sequitur essays in the book and the rhythm of the language (I read the Julie Rose translation).

Later in the summer, when we were in Paris, I wanted to seek out the places in the novel, but we were there for only a short time, and I was a little sad that the city no longer looked way it was pictured in Hugo’s novel.

I estimate that I’ve read something in the neighborhood of 550 novels in my life (a little over 500 since 1996) and when I finished Les Miserables it instantly jumped to the top stop of best novels I’ve ever read.

It was also the longest book I read in 2023 but, as it turns out, only the 5th longest book I’ve read overall, beaten out by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (1,616 pages), Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows (1,423 pages), Executive Orders by Tom Clancy (1,358 pages), and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York **by Robert A. Caro (1,345 pages).

3/4. Stella Maris and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

I read The Passenger for our book club, and I really liked it. I just had to read the follow-on book, Stella Maris, which I enjoyed even better. It is one of those rare novels that could be done as a play. These were the second and third Cormac McCarthy books I’ve read and so far, I’ve thought all of his books were excellent.

5. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments by Joe Posnanski

I had been looking forward to Why We Love Baseball ever since Joe Posnanski announced it. Recall that my favorite book of 2021 was Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100. I was not disappointed. Joe writes so passionately about baseball. He is a modern-day Red Smith. There is a reason why I love Joe Posnanski’s writing.

6. Doom Guy: Life In First Person by John Romero

I was never really a Doom player, but I’ve been a software developer my entire life and it was fascinating to read about someone who grew up with computers in a manner similar to me, beginning with machines like a Commodore Vic-20 and copying code out of computer magazines. Doom Guy was a honest, fascinating read.

7. Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

Toward the end of each year, I tend to read Hollywood memoirs. They are a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Making It So by Patrick Stewart was one of these. This was a book that made me want to be an actor after reading it, always a good sign because it conveys its message so well.

8. The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Really smart people fascinate me. I read a fascinating biography of John von Neumann back in 2022, The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya. So when I saw that there was a novel based on von Neumann’s life, The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, I had to read it, and it was a fun, fantastic read.

Favorite articles of 2023

Early in 2023, I wrote a script that sends me an email each evening with a random article from the variety of print magazines I get in the mail. Here is an example email from last night.

I try to read a feature article every day of the year, and here are a few of the more than 300 that I read in 2023 that really stood out.

  • Baseball and Time by Joe Posnanski — JoeBlogs (3/23)
  • Down the River Roosevelt by Larry Rohter — Smithsonian (4/23)
  • Judy Blume Goes All the Way by Amy Weiss-Meyer — Atlantic (4/23)
  • A Love Letter to Riverside by David Danelski — UCR Magazine (Spring 2023)
  • Why People Hate Open Offices (Psychology) by George Musser — Scientific American (4/23)
  • How Baseball Saved Itself by Mark Leibovich — Atlantic (7-8/23)
  • Postscript: Robert Gottlieb by David Remnick — New Yorker (6/26/2023)
  • “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks — Atlantic (9/23)
  • “17,517,490 Memories, Missing”[AliasDelimiter] by Megan Greenwall — Wired (9/23)
  • Inside the Revolution at OpenAI by Ross Andersen — Atlantic (9/23)
  • The Ones We Sent Away by Jennifer Senior — Atlantic (9/23)
  • Dreams of My Father by Karl Ove Knausgaard — Harpers (9/23)
  • The Golden Fleece by Joe Kloc — Harper’s (10/23)
  • A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft by James Somers — New Yorker (11/20/23)
  • Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built by Joshua Rothman — New Yorker (11/20/23)
  • The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI by Charles Duhigg — New Yorker (12/1/23)

Summary of my 2023 reading

I read 101 books in 2023, once again hitting my Goodreads goal of 100 books. I read my 1,300th book since 1996 in 2023 and ending the year with a total of 1,330 books since 1996. About a third of the books I read were fiction, the remaining two-thirds non-fiction. I’ve recently been working on a two-level taxonomy for my reading, and here’s how it breaks down at the high level for 2023:

Within each of these top-level categories are about a dozen sub-categories, so that, for instance, the Literature and Fiction category breaks down as follows for 2023:

The next biggest subject area I read in 2023 was science and technology, the breakdown of which looks as follows:

Overall, here is the breakdown for the types of books I read in 2023:

My goal for 2024 is another 100 books and 300 articles, and so far, I am well on my way. Here are my best reads from previous years:

A Journey Through the Star Trek Lit-Verse

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Over Thanksgiving I read Patrick Stewart’s new memoir, Making It So, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Reading it put me in mind of Star Trek, even though Stewart’s time on the show and the films make up a relatively small portion of the book. I know little Star Trek lore beyond what most casual viewers of the show know. Indeed, I’ve never seen most episodes of the original series. The series with which I am most familiar is The Next Generation, and even there I have large gaps in my viewing. Deep Space Nine, and Voyagers are unknown to me. I have seen and enjoyed the newer films, but I understand that there are supposed to take place on an alternate timeline.

And thus begins the complications of the last few days. Arriving back from a long holiday weekend in New York, and needing a break from the long run of nonfiction I’ve been reading lately (18 out of the last 20 books), I was looking for something fun and entertaining to read and it occurred to me: what about a Star Trek novel?

I can hear those of your with much greater Star Trek knowledge than I possess laughing. It is one thing to want to read a Star Trek novel. It is something else entirely to figure out where to begin. Within 20 minutes of searching, I discovered the Star Trek “Lit-verse” and it is as vast as Gene Roddenberry’s galaxy. In a situation like this, the easiest thing for me is to begin at the beginning. But I couldn’t even find a list of all of the Star Trek novels in publication order. The Wikipedia page that lists Star Trek novels is huge, and contains multiple, overlapping lists. A single sub-list (“numbered novels”) contains 97 entries between 1979-2002.

More searching led me to The Trek Collective which had a Trek-Lit Reading Order Flow Chart, the complexity of which reminded me of a diagram one might find in Engineering on the Enterprise. While impressive in its detail and complexity, it made it no clearer where to start. The Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Guide broke things down by series, but it still didn’t answer the simple question, “Where should I start?” It did offer a useful piece of advice, however:

My goal here was to include every link possible and leave the continuity problems up to the reader to resolve. If you don’t want a book in your personal continuity, then just ignore it. Don’t become so invested in continuity that you forget to enjoy the stories themselves.

Ultimately, I opted for three books from different series to start with, mostly by hunt-and-peck method:

I began reading Captain to Captain yesterday and, so far, it has been a lot of fun. Just the kind of fun that I was looking for.

I asked ChatGPT the following just after I started reading Captain to Captain: “I want to start reading some novels in the Star Trek universe, but there are so many of them I don’t even know where to begin. Can you suggest a pathway through these novels that makes sense?” ChatGPT responded with the following list to start with:

The Original Series

  • Spock’s World by Diane Duane
  • The Entropy Effect by Vonda N. McIntyre

The Next Generation

  • Q-Squared by Peter David
  • Imzadi by Peter David

Deep Space Nine

  • The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack
  • A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson

Voyager

  • Full Circle by Kirsten Beyer

Enterprise

  • The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin

Crossover Novels

  • Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

New Frontier series by Peter David

“Discovery” and “Picard” novels

Obviously, I’m still figuring out which direction to go here. If anyone has advice or suggestions as to how to tackle this thorny problem, or if anyone knows of a list that guides one through a good selection of the novels and stories in the Star Trek universe, I’d be grateful if you shared your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

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Books I Read Between 1977-1995

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As readers know, I have kept a list of books I have read since 1996. (As of this writing, there are 1,241 books on the list.) Last spring, I tried to estimate how many books I read before I kept my list. I have been thinking about it more and more, and over the last few weeks, have been trying to remember the books I read beginning in kindergarten. As I remembered books, I scribbled them on a few pieces of notebook paper. To make it easier to remember, I divided the list into several sections: grade school, junior high school, high school, college, and 1994-1995.

The result is a list of books I read before 1996, which I have now published online along with my other reading lists. The list is not complete. I’d guess that I was able to recall about half of the books I actually read between 1977 and 1995. Other than being divided into the sections listed above, the books are in order I recalled them when trying to remember what I’d read. A lot of books I read in junior high school and college for classes have faded from my memory. A lot of books I read for fun remained. So while this list is not complete, it is a good representation of my reading in the years before 1996.

As I recall more books, I’ll add them to the list.

Written on 11 March 2023.

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My Best Reads of 2022

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With 2022 now behind us, I can safely post my list of 10 best reads of the year, without excluding any potential late-comers. This is actually the second draft of this post. The first draft came in at something over 2,500 words, and as I read it, I thought: No one wants to read this much other stuff. They just want the list. To that end, I’ve tried to cut this significantly.

Summary of my reading in 2022

I read 101 books in 2022, finally meeting my goal of 100 books again, after two consecutive years of falling short. 65 of the 101 books were nonfiction. I was surprised by this because my tendency these last few years has been heavily toward nonfiction. But I reread some old fiction series I’ve enjoyed in the past and that shifted the balance somewhat.

My 10 best reads of 2022

A few notes before I get to the list:

  • These are the ten books I most enjoyed reading in 2022; they are not the the ten best books that debuted in 2022. The books on the list were published over a wide range of years, the earliest being 1970 with only 2 of the books on the list debuting in 2022.
  • In past years, I’ve listed the books as a countdown from 10 to 1. It seems to me this buries the lead and is an injustice to the books that I most enjoyed. This year, I’m listing them from my 1 to 10, and damn the suspense.

Here, then, are my best reads of 2022:

1. A Place to Read: Life and Books by Michael Cohen (2014)

Cover image of A Place to Read

This collection of essays by a former professor resonated strongly with me: the subjects, the style, the fact that we were both pilots. The book was an accidental discovery, a rare success for Amazon’s recommendation system. It is one of several books this year that convinced me that I want to be an essayist. It was my favorite read of 2022.

2. Destiny of the Republic: A tale of madness, medicine and the murder of a president by Candice Millard (2011)

Cover image of Destiny of the Republic

I took a big lesson from Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: that anyone rising to a position like that of President of the United States is worth reading about, even if they are not as well known (to me), anyway). James Garfield’s story was gripping, and Millard’s telling of it was wonderful, fascinating, and ultimately heartbreaking.

3. This Living Hand: Essays, 1972-2012 by Edmund Morris (2012)

Cover for This Living Hand

The essays in This Living Hand run the gamut of subjects, from biographical to autobiographical, big subjects and themes to small ones, like the value of handwriting, and what one can learn from it. I’d had mixed experiences with Edmund Morris in the past, greatly enjoying his 3-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and perplexed by his unorthodox biography of Thomas Edison. But This Living Hand was a treasure to read, and another push toward wanting to write essays.

4. Hell and Back by Craig Johnson (2022)

Cover for Hell and Back

Hell and Back, the most recent installment in the Walt Longmire series (my favorite fiction series) supplanted the 7th book in the series, Hell is Empty as my favorite Longmire book. This is a different Longmire story, in tone as well as in the way it is told.

5. The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya (2022)

Cover for Man from the Future

John von Neumann has come up frequently in my reading and from those incidental glances, I had the idea that he was a smart person even among smart people. I was delighted to find and read this new biography of von Neumann, The Man from the Future, and it convinced me that he was very likely the smartest person I have ever read about.

6. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace (2005)

Cover for Consider the Lobster

I’ve had Infinite Jest on my bookshelf for years, tempting me. Since I’d been reading a lot of essay collections this year, I thought I’d read some of Wallace’s essays first, and the first collection I read was Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. I was blown away by his writing, and came away awe-struck, and somewhat depressed. I don’t think I could ever write essays as well as Wallace did.

7. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark (2014)

Cover for Our Mathematical Universe

I came to Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe via James Gleick’s Chaos. I was immediately impressed by the scope, style, humor, and imagination that Tegmark put into the book. It was one of those reads that made me want to follow up with more, and I read his book, Life 3.0 as soon as I finished this one.

8. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4 by Robert A. Caro (2012)

Cover for The Passage of Power

The 4th volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power turned out to be my favorite so far. The arc of Johnson’s career and his thrust into the presidency after the Kennedy assassination is a great illustration of how unique the job is, and how no career, no matter how stories, can really prepare someone for it.

9. The Rising Sun: The Decline & Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 by John Toland (1970)

Cover for The Rising Sun

I’ve read a lot of the history of the Second World War, but I’d never read a history that focuses primarily on Japan. This is exactly what The Rising Sun by John Toland does. There were five themes that I found particularly interesting in this book.

10. The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (2018)

Cover for Diary of a Bookseller

Now and then I imagine what it might be like to own a used bookstore. After reading The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, I no longer have to imagine. This is a charming book about the owner of the largest used bookstore in Scotland, who has kept a diary about the day-to-day running of the shop. I enjoyed it so much that I followed it up with its sequel.

Honorable mentions

In addition to these best reads of the year, here are some other books I read this year worthy of mention:

I am aiming to read at least 100 books in 2023. It is always exciting to start out the year and wonder what will the best reads end up being? I’ll let you know a year from now. In the meantime, if you are interested here, are some past lists:

Written 26-31 December 2022.

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My Guilty Pleasure Reading List

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hollywood sign
Photo by Paul Deetman on Pexels.com

It is getting close to December which means close to our end-of-year holiday which means time I spend reading for guilty pleasure after a year of serious, hardcore reading. I’ve started to prepare a list of what to read and few days ago, on Twitter, I asked for some recommendations:

For me, guilty-pleasure reading1 usually consists of biographies and memoirs about celebrities past, or histories of Hollywood and things like that. It occurred to me that when I asked for recommendations, I didn’t indicate those books that I’ve already read. To remedy that, I create a Guilty Pleasure Reading list on my reading list site listing all of the guilty-pleasure books I’ve read over the years. There, you can see all of the books I’ve read that fall into this category. I’ve included a section on my 5 favorites. And I’ve included links to some posts I’ve written about these books. Now, if you are wondering whether or not I have read a specific Hollywood bio, memoir, or history, you can go to this list and find out.

So far, for the end of the year, I’ve got the following books lined up:

I can usually tackle 6-8 books during this break. If you’ve got other recommendations in this genre, please drop them in the comments. If there are really good, they may supplant the ones listed above.

Written on 21 November 2022.

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  1. Not really guilty at all. ↩

My Best Reads of 2021

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Now that 2022 has arrived, I can safely post my Best Reads of 2021. I get annoyed by the early birds who post their “best reads” list beginning in November. They may be trying to drum up sales for the holiday season, but they leave out potentially great books that come out in December. For instance, #6 in my list below, All About Me by Mel Brooks didn’t debut until the very last day of November 2021. I didn’t read it until the second half of December, and yet it made #6 on my list.

My reading was down from last year. It seems to have dropped every year, from its peak of 130 books back in 2018. 2021 saw me barely break 80 books. Some of these books were long books, but there were two things keeping my from my goal of 100 books this year:

  1. In the late spring/early summer, I got sucked into listening to dozens of episodes of the Tim Ferris Show Podcast. On average, those episodes are something like 2 hours long. They seriously ate into my reading time, although I got quite a few good book recommendations out of them.
  2. In the fall, after finishing Rhythm of War, I couldn’t figure out what to read next. Nothing seemed appealing. I started and stopped countless books and for nearly a month, completed almost nothing.

I think if it weren’t for these two interludes, I would have made my goal of reading 100 books in 2021.

Here, then, are my 10 top reads of 2021. Note that an asterisk (*) after the title denotes a book that came out in 2021. All other books came out prior to 2021.

10. Life Itself by Roger Ebert

cover for life itself by roger ebert

Life Itself was one of the very first audio books I bought back in 2013 when I started using Audible, but incredibly, I didn’t read the book until December 2021 while I was driving down to Florida for our annual holiday vacation. I’m sorry that I didn’t read it sooner. It was a great read, a terrific memoir of a newspaper man who happened to become a movie critic. I especially liked Ebert’s descriptions of his travels.

I wrote about this book in my post “On the Road with Stoker and Ebert.”

9. Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek

cover for franklin d. roosevelt: a political life by robert dallek

I always enjoy a good Presidential biography and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life was a good Presidential biography. I’ve read several biographies of FDR over the years. I am fascinated by his life and the times that he lived in. Having also read William Manchester’s 3-volume biography of Sir Winston Churchill, I especially enjoy seeing how these two extraordinary men worked together to help win the Second World War.

I wrote about this book in my post “Thoughts on Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life.”

8. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

During the spring, I began reading books on information theory and the history of computing. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood was the first of these. After this book, I couldn’t stop myself and I ended up reading a total of 12 books on the subject. Remarkably, three of those 12 books ended up in the top 10 of my best reads of 2021.

I wrote more about this book in my post “Vacation Reading: The History of Computing.”

7. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

This is the second of the 3 information theory/history of computing books to appear this best-of list. Turing’s Cathedral was a fascinating look at the development of information theory. One of the people who provided Dyson with information for this book was the computer scientist Willis Ware, who I actually knew early in my career, and who once, in the mid-1990s, complimented me on a presentation I gave on the (then) new Netscape Navigator web browser.

I mentioned this book in my post “Best Book in the Last 125 Years.”

6. All About Me* by Mel Brooks

I was looking forward to All About Me! months before it was released. When it was released, on November 30, I had to force myself to wait to read it until I was down in Florida for our holiday vacation. That’s because I have a tradition of reading Hollywood memoirs while vacationing in Florida. I was not disappointed. Brooks’s book was everything I hoped it would be. And the audiobook was narrated by Mel Brooks himself which made it all the more enjoyable. Reading the book made me want to go back and watch all of Brooks’s movies, especially he early ones.

5. The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family* by Ron Howard and Clint Howard

One of the rare events that occurs in my reading is reading two outstanding books back-to-back. Usually, when I read a really terrific book, I find it hard to read whatever book comes next because it is rarely as good as the book I just finished. But The Boys by Ron Howard and Clint Howard was an outstanding follow-up to reading The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski. This was a terrific book about growing up in Hollywood from the perspective of 2 child actors who went on to spend their careers in show business.

I wrote more about this book in my post “Ronnie, Reacher and the Babe.”

4. Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

In the last 2 months of 2020, I raced through the first 3 books of Brandon Sanderson’s STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE series. Rhythm of War had just come out, but I decided that I needed a break from those books. After more than 3,000 pages, I wanted to get back to nonfiction. Then, in early November, desperate for something to read, I returned to the book. I raced through its 1,200+ pages in relatively short order. It was an outstanding read. I think it was this book that pushed Sanderson’s series ahead of Patrick Rothfuss’s KINGKILLER CHRONICLES as my favorite fantasy series. The last few hundred pages reduced me to tears more than once.

I wrote more about this book in my post “Books That Reduced Me To Tears.”

3. UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan

Brian W. Kernighan’s memoir, Unix: A History and a Memoir is quite possibly the single best memoir of the early computing age I have read. I knew of Kernighan as one of the co-creators of Unix and of the C programming language. I’d been looking for a good history of Unix for a long time, and when I saw that Kernighan had written a memoir, I leaped at it. This was one of the books I read in the spring during my rampage through the history of information theory and computer science and it was my favorite of all of them.

I wrote more about this book in my post “Vacation Reading: The History of Computing.”

2. 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet* by Pamela Paul

I loved Pamela Paul’s My Life With Bob when that came out, and so when I saw she had a new book coming out, I jumped on it. 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet was a pure joy. It was full of nostalgia for me. I grew up in pre-Internet days, and my first real interactions with the Internet began in 1994 when I started at the company I am still with today. This was not only a wonderful read, but it is the kind of book I’d love to sit with and read aloud to my kids, one essay each night, to give them a sense of what life was like before Google and YouTube and TikTok and smart phones. It is a book I will definitely read again.

I wrote more about this book in my post “Pamela Paul Is Reading My Mind.”

1. The Baseball 100* by Joe Posnanski

When I started reading Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100 I had a glimmering that this was something special. He wrote these 100 essays, amounting to 300,000 words, in the space of 100 days as a feature on The Athletic. But reading them all together in a single volume was something remarkable. You get the entire history of baseball through 100 people who played the game. And while it doesn’t seem possible, the book isn’t repetitive, either in substance or in style. The essays themselves are works of art, often shaped by their subject. Over the years, I have read a lot of baseball books, but The Baseball 100 quickly became my favorite of them all. It was also the best book I read in all of 2021.

I wrote more about this book in my posts, “Thoughts on The Baseball 100,” and “Impressive Feats of Writing.”

There you have them: my best reads of 2021. The best part of finishing a list like this is knowing that there will be another list like this one a year from now and trying to imagine: what books will just blow me away in the coming year.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Thankful for Books

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one of my bookcases

This time of year we often reflect on those things that we are thankful for. Toward the top of the list are things like family and friends, good health, good fortune. Below that level is where things often start to vary for people. I was trying to think of about the things that I was thankful for after family and friends, good health and good fortune. What I came up with was books. I am thankful for books.

From a young age, my parents emphasized the importance of books and of reading. My mom told me that books could take me anywhere and teach me anything. I was four or five when she told me that and I took it to heart. My dad read to me often. Because of this, I learned to read quickly and from an early time, books have been an important part of my life. Indeed, for the last 25 years, books mark important events in my life like a kind of bibliographical calendar.

More recently, I’ve come to realize something else about book that I am thankful for: that I am in the fortunate position to buy one whenever I feel like it. This wasn’t always the case. I can remember many times when I was younger where I would look longingly at books, but not have the money to buy them. When I did buy a book, it was a weighty decision to buy a new hardcover for $19.95 when money was tight and that $19.95 was really needed for the gas or electric bill.

Today, however, if there is a book that I want, I buy it without worry. We don’t spend a lot of money on fancy cars, or expensive clothes or furniture. But when it comes to books, I allow myself some extravagance. I might buy an audio book and then decide I want the Kindle edition as well. Sometimes, for books that I really like, I’ll pickup a paper version in addition to have on my shelf. Sometimes, I’ll discover a rare edition online and spend a little more than I might otherwise spend to get it. By doing this, I am taking small advantage of the good fortunate we’ve had to act on what my parents taught me when I was a youngster. Because of that, I sit in my office today, surrounded by books that have taken me everywhere, and taught me countless things.

No investment I have made has given more of a return than books. Twenty dollars spent on a hardcover returns not only hours of enjoyment in reading, but countless times its value in the lessons I take from it, whether the book is fiction or nonfiction. Books taught me the difference between a specialist and a generalist, and have turned me into the latter, something else for which I am grateful this time of year. Reading books taught me how to write and writing has become my avocation, more for me to be thankful for.

I am surrounded here in my office my somewhere around 1,200 books, collected slowly over a lifetime. On my digital bookshelves, there are another 1,200 audio books and 500 or so ebooks. I could go on and list why I am thankful for each and every one of them, but I will spare you that. Instead, I’ll just say that I spent a lot of time thinking about how lucky I am to be able to read, to have passion for reading, to enjoy books, and to be in the incredibly fortunate position to acquire and accumulate them. For much of my life, I knew what it was like to look upon bookshelves with envy and longing. To be able to own my own books and read them is something for which I will be forever thankful.

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A Book I’m Looking Forward To: The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski

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cover of the baseball 100 by joe posnanski

Every now and then I discover a new book that really hits the sweet spot for me and I can’t wait to read it. Most recently it was The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski. I love baseball, and I have a think for the rich history of the game. Just do a search for “baseball” in the list of books I’ve read since 1996 and you’ll see just how much I’ve read on the subject. Indeed, baseball writing is an art form in its own right. There are sportswriters, and there are baseball writers. I sometimes daydream that I could be the latter. I especially love baseball essays. And this book is a collection of 100 essays about the lives of the 100 greatest players of the game, according to Joe Posnanski.

My hardcover edition of the book arrived yesterday, and I am itching to get started reading it. First, I have to finish the book I am currently read, a fascinating biography of Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, who, though born in 1838, lived long enough to witness Babe Ruth play baseball. In addition to baseball, I have a thing for the Adams family. But once I finish the book, with should be sometime today, I am eager to start this new baseball history. Perfect timing, too, since October, in addition to being a rare month for boys1 is also magic time in the baseball world.

Anyway, if you are wondering what I am reading this weekend, now you know.

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Thoughts on Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek

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There are certain people I can read about endlessly. John Quincy Adams is one. And Franklin D. Roosevelt is another. In the former case, I’m fascinated by who I think was probably the most intelligent president the United States ever had. In the latter case, I’m amazed that a person such as Roosevelt happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills to lead the country out of dark times. I’ve read two previous biographies of FDR: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s outstanding book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on the Home Front in World War II, and Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. The former focused on the years of the Second World War, and the latter on the extraordinary relationship between FDR and Winston Churchill.

But I still thoroughly enjoyed Robert Dallek’s Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, which more broadly captures Roosevelt’s political gifts throughout his life, although focusing primarily on his presidency. One reason I can keep reading about FDR is that he is endlessly fascinating. Born to privilege, he aimed to help the masses. Paralyzed from the waist down due to polio, he nevertheless maintained a generally cheerful disposition. He had his darker sides: his affairs, as well as his decision to set aside the rights of Japanese American citizens during the Second World War and collect them in camps. People loved him and people hated him. In the polarizing times that we live in today, there is something reassuring that democratic politics, at least, has always been polarizing and what we are experience today is more of the same. History, as the saying goes, is doomed to repeat itself.

I’m also impressed by hard workers, and those who don’t give up. Despite his inability to use his legs, FDR won election as president in a dark time, and through will and hard work, brought about changes that pulled the nation from the brink of disaster. During the war, even as his health declined, he worked tirelessly–and to the detriment of his own well-being–to see the fight through to the end. Dallek’s book provides a view of Roosevelt as a shrewd politician, and a leader through tough times. Despite all of that, he could be self-deprecating, relating the following story:

“Eleanor was just in here after a morning appointment with her doctor. ‘So, what did he say about that big ass of yours?'” Franklin reported himself as asking. “Oh, Franklin,” she replied, “He had nothing at all to say about you.”

His relationship with Winston Churchill was well-documented in Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston, to say nothing of William Manchester’s outstanding 3-volume biography of Churchill. What struck me reading Dallek’s book was the sheer coincidence of two capable, and charismatic leaders rising to power at a time when the world needed these leaders. It is coincidences like this that make history so fascinating, and so arbitrary.

The biggest irony of Roosevelt’s life is that he worked himself to death to see the Allies win the war, only to die before Germany and Japan surrendered. He died 18 days before Hitler’s suicide. I’ve read several dozen biographies of U.S. Presidents and I almost always come away from them not understanding why anyone would want the job. It is a job for which there is no adequate job description, a job for which, no previous experience can truly prepare you. It is a job that visibly ages the men who have taken it. And it certainly took Roosevelt’s life. I was returning from my morning walk, listening to the audio book edition of the book when FDR died, and though I knew it was coming, it still brought tears to my eyes. I had the feeling, expressed so well by Winston Churchill on learning of Roosevelt’s death:

I felt as if I had been struck a physical blow. My relations with this shining personality had played a large part in the long, terrible years we worked together. Now they had come to an end, and I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irrepressible loss.

I didn’t want the book to be over. I didn’t want it to be over so much, that I queued up another FDR biography, H. W. Brand’s A Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which I plan to read sometime in the next couple of weeks.

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Really. Big. Books.

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Beach reading for the long weekend

There is something about really long books that I find irresistible. The longer the better. As a bibliophile, Really. Long. Books. are almost a fetish with me. I suppose that part of it is simply that when I am reading a good book, I never want it to end. I find myself looking to see how much more I have left before it is all over. With a really big book (which I will hereafter refer to as an RBB), I might be 500 pages in and still have 600 pages to go. That is always heartening, especially when I am enjoying what i am reading. If I read a review of a book and somewhere it mentions its RBB-ness, positively or negatively, I immediately have to investigate.

What constitutes an RBB? The answer is different for everyone. For me, when a book hits at least 700 or 800 pages, it’s an RBB. I was thinking about RBBs because this evening, I began reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which at 1,079 pages, certainly meets my RBB criteria.

RBBs can be challenging for a number of reasons. They are so long that I sometimes make it further into an RBB than I might a book of normal length before deciding it doesn’t work for me. RBBs are an investment, but they also require trust. You have to have a good sense of what you think you’ll like when you invest time in an RBB. When an RBB works out, it is great, but it also takes longer to read than your normal-sized book. In the time it would take me to read Infinite Jest, for instance, I could read five normal-sized books. That makes for another challenge, one I’ve often heard from magazine editors when accepting or rejecting a novelette or novella: is this long story worth the space that two or three shorter stories might take? Or, for my RBB, is the book worth the time that three or four other books might take?

Not every RBB I’ve tried works out. Earlier this year I tried reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hafstader, which, at just over 700 pages, barely qualifies as an RBB. But I couldn’t get through it.

Some RBBs I’ve read several times. Stephen King’s It is one example.That book is over 1,000 pages and I have read it at least five times.

I love RBBs, but there is something I love even more than an RBB: a series of RBBs. These are not easy to come across, but late last year, I began reading Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives series. The first book in the series, The Way of Kings is just over 1,000 pages. Each subsequent book gets longer and longer until the forth and most recent is over 1,200 pages. And there are supposed to be 10 books in this series when it is finished! I’ve read the first three so far, and will eventually get around to the fourth.

There are also series of RBBs that are nonfiction. Perhaps my favorite is Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization which is an 11-volume history of human civilization. The first book came out in 1935 and the last in 1975. Many of the books in this series are in the 800-900 page range, with the forth installment, The Age of Faith, being the longest at nearly 1,200 pages. The 11 volumes total 13,549 pages. I’ve read the first six books in the series.

Some RBBs I’ve collected but not yet read. I got them because they were RBBs but also because the subjects were fascinating and I was amazed that there could be such detail in a subject to warrant the length. There are books that sit on my shelves, calling to me now and then, but which I won’t likely get to until I have time to concentrate on them more fully. Two examples: Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which comes in at around 1,400 pages; and Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson’s The Ants, which is an RBB both in page count and stature. The book is enormous!

I don’t know if I will make it through Infinite Jest or not. I know it doesn’t qualify for what many people consider to be beach reading, but that’s what I am taking with me to the beach. There’s nothing quite like sun, surf, sand, and a good RBB to keep your mind occupied while your kids are bury you in the sand.

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