Reading List: Q4 2023
Less sci-fi, more hi-fi, with 3 of my top books of the year in the final quarter
This list has evolved from pure cardinality (hey, look at my library backlog) to a graph of reading connections and referrals. Any time you promote content for a decade, it shifts from update and cadence to professed allegiance to content creators. With the increased competition for attention, content spend and the scarcity of proper marketing for books, my low-gain amplification of authors’ signals is my contribution to the cause. And if it helps those authors earn a living wage, or explore their next projects, it is rewarding in multiple aspects.
I’ve also tried to move from medically unhealthy doses of sci-fi into music, sports, business, non-fiction, biographies and topics outside of my historic comfort zones. Recommendations from friends, authors whose work I enjoy, and the annual Locus awards list inform my selections.
33. “Key Changes: Ten Times Technology Changed The Music Business,” Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, music/business, finished October 6
Written by two of the leading experts in digital music, copyrights, college radio and music production, “Key Changes” takes a tour from the early player piano and phonograph to TikTok, AI generated music and streaming services. Their model for evaluating how each technology introduction impacted the full ecosystem of artists, consumers, channels (and their lawyers) sometimes tilts toward the academic, but the model itself and the distillation of technology waves that reach the edges of the ecosystem can be applied to other markets as well (for me it’s healthcare and sustainability). There is quite a bit of humor and very subtle cultural references are sprinkled throughout – and you’ll understand where “put a sock in it” and “album” came from – I learned things in the first 30 pages which is always a buying sign.
34. “Starter Villain,” John Scalzi, non-fiction/sci-fi, finished October 13.
I adore John Scalzi - his blog, his appearances, his writing, his outlook on life. I tend to (a) devour his work faster than normal (b) always find something uplifting in it and (c) refer to him frequently. “Starter Villain” could have been a novel interrupted by Covid, but instead is a James Bond riffing, fast paced pseudo-spy novel that has you peeling the misdirection onion until the very end. What Ian Fleming did with car chases and innuendo, Scalzi does with tight prose, snark, and anthropomorphic cats (and dolphins) that make you believe that if animals could really talk Scalzi would write them perfectly.
35. “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis, non-fiction, finished October 26
I’ve been a Lewis fan since “Liar’s Poker,” as his grasp of the zeitgeist – on Wall Street, for power, for sports and for stories that blend them all – is remarkable. Discount our shared Princeton connection (I didn’t know him at all) and the purported literary license with the Michael Oher story, and he returns to his financial and network-of-outcasts roots with “Going Infinite.” The story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, right up to the point where his criminal trial began, is well researched and fast paced. Lewis eschews long exposition on what crypto currencies are, or why the blockchain was going to change the world of transactions, and delves into the worlds of ultra narrow hedge funds (Jane Street) and effective altruism (the guiding philosophy for SBF and others, cast into a dark shadow by the FTX saga). The book doesn’t take sides or made judgements, and so becomes a bit of a Sopranos like story of an outlier with bad friends overlaid with an utter lack of empathy where everything is an algorithm – one that doesn’t degenerate into infinity, as so often referenced in the book.
36. “Starling House,” Alix Harrow, fantasy, finished November 12.
“The Shining” meets “Beauty and the Beast” with a touch of Disney’s Haunted Mansion and a family drama. “Haunting” is too mild as there are pointedly sad and anger-filled moments, and the ghosts are as much spirit world as reflection of the main characters’ mental models. While I’m not normally a huge fantasy fan, I adore the way Alix Harrow crafts narrative.
37. “My Effin’ Life,” Geddy Lee, music/biography, finished November 25.
Lee’s book is perhaps the best ever written about the dynamics of being in a band, creative differences, and how the musician’s life is really that of a “working man.” There is no discussion of what they did (or did badly) with their wealth, or rock and roll excess, or even how Lee took his interest in collection to a point of obsession with wine and baseball memorabilia. There are some wonderful song backstories and a few insights into life on the road but they decoration on a well told story of adult friendship. What emerges are tales of growing older gracefully under pressure, of grief, and of loss – not just the obvious death of Neil Peart that concludes the book’s main sequence, but also Peart’s first wife and daughter, their long-time photographer Andrew Naughton and most vividly, Lee’s father. The brackets that hold up the Rush-themed content are a long early chapter on Lee’s parents’ history in Eastern Europe, including their time in concentration camps and how they found each other after the war and the conclusion where he and guitarist Alex Lifeson secretly, deeply personally help Peart navigate the brain cancer that would take his life within two years. For me, on that deep personal level, the exposition about the Holocaust and its long-term echoes in Lee’s mind through so much of his life is both timely (sadly) and a crucial bit of “yiddishkeit.” The last chapter is a workshop in moving from grief to memory, in Lee’s words, and shaped my processing of the deaths of a co-author early this year as well as a favorite musician and good friend of my music teacher just three months ago. Lee mentions in passing that the final book is less than half the heft of the original manuscript, and I wish he would do it all again and talk only about baseball and wine and being a zayde.
DNF. “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein, non-fiction
Coming highly recommended from several sources, Klein’s tale of how she became increasingly intertwined and confused with a more far-right public personality starts off with great intent, but then degrades into similar rhetoric, poorly researched or supported themes and the similarly shaped if not directionally opposite of what she projects onto her doppelganger. I put it down not because it was boring (it was, in a repetitive talk show manner) after a few chapters but because it’s emblematic of how we cannot have reasonable discourse. As Klein draws on jer Jewish roots, I’ll draw on my Jewish grandmother’s word: “feh.”
38. “Frank Zappa FAQ,” John Corcelli, music, finished December 13.
A nicely integrated collection of essays that fill in the blanks around Zappa’s musical influences and approaches to composition, performance and recording. I deeply appreciated the outside-in view of Zappa as counter-cultural, and his path to resenting the establishment from education to government to corporations. The level of detail is remarkable and consistent, although the book reads as more a set of related thoughts than a single thematic work.
39. “Arboreality,” Rebecca Campbell, fiction, finished December 19.
A set of interconnected stories in novella form that present climate change and its visceral impacts on a set of ocean based communities. Winner of the Ursula K Le Guin price for fiction, this is a near-distant future book that is frighteningly relatable – what happens when we have no more tone wood to make stringed instruments? When we battle erosion and rising sea levels, threatening the classic works captured in dead trees – when paper is endangered in its future and contemporary forms?
40. “The Lost Cause,” Cory Doctorow, near-future fiction, finished December 23.
Mild disclaimer: I’m a complete Cory fan-boy, whether it’s his newest Martin Hench work, his takes on copyright, content, economics, surveillance, privacy, climate change – and in “Lost Cause” – all of those rolled into one. Much like “Makers” gave me hope at the nadir of the financial crisis aftermath, this book is so packed with ideas that are both plausible and important. On the heels of Campbell’s stories about absolute economic and ecological disaster, I found hope and perhaps a glimmer of a more immediate future here. It is, though, a love story and an Occupy story (and Cory gives weight to that movement and ideal) and an “all politics is local” story rolled into the near future. The story unspools like a rope moving too fast through tackle – racing, snarl, undo the tangle, more racing, snarl, and eventually you figure out what the underlying causes are.
41. “Tonechaser,” Steve Rosen, music biography, finished December 26.
Author Rosen wrote for the major guitar player magazines for years, and had cover stories featuring rock and roll majesty that spanned two decades. “Tonechaser” explores his long-term friendship with Edward Van Halen, from the band’s early days in Los Angeles for the ensuing quarter century. It’s not a book of excess (as some band biographies) are, nor a deconstruction of songs and albums; it’s a transcription of phone calls and professional interviews between two music-loving adults who had a deep and trusting friendship. While there are passages that repeat (between edited and transcribed interviews, or callbacks to certain vocabulary and phrasing Van Halen used) there is so much deep insight into how Eddie Van Halen created music, crafted tone and dealt with the dynamics of his immigrant family, his band family and later his own family – with exceptionally high dynamic range. Rosen’s insecurities as a writer and as a friend-of-a-famous person who dealt with their own insecurities (often expressed as indifference to praise, awards or even a poor short-term memory for facts) mirror each other without detouring into depressing or meaningless chatter. Rosen processes the demise of his Van Halen friendship and eventually Eddie’s death, with the book serving as a 570-page eulogy for both.
42. “The Paradox Hotel”, Rob Hart, sci-fi, finished December 27
“The Shining” meets “How To Lose The Time War” with some detective work holding it together. For the most part, a fun and fast paced read, although some of the time jumps and a few plot twists were harder to follow – and I’m still not convinced I understood the entire plot resolution.
43. “Afterworld,” Debbi Urbanski, sci-fi/eco, finished December 27.
I read this in one day, and it was disturbing, terrifying, heart-wrenching and utterly believable. There is a blunt-trauma approach to solving climate change (make the human race die off quickly), matter of fact, literally brutal post-pandemic scenarios (think “The Day After” from 1983 but more descriptive), the evolution of family dynamics and how a love story escapes from this black hole of tragedy. Urbanski covers a lot of ground, with light humor, frank survivalist views, and a deep questioning of what “for the greater good” means.
The only area of intersection we seem to have is the Lewis book, which I personally thought was interesting in a car crash way, but much weaker than Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. While Lewis had access (which sort of pissed me off, the thought of Nature Boy sitting in professorville with Mom and Dad, a life paid for by Stanford Law School), Faux details out what it's like to lay down cash to buy a Bored Ape NFT so he can get into a party in NY, which scared the shit out me, the convoluted crypto bullshit he had to go through. Insane. Thanks for your list. My list is dictated by two book clubs I belong to and whatever project I'm obsessed with at the time.