52 Books in 2020

A reflection on reading a new book every week in 2020

books!

January 6, 2021

Shortly before I graduated in mid-2019, I decided that it was time for me to start reading again. I was a ravenous reader as a child but something knocked me out of the habit as I got older. Maybe it was the homework or the extracurriculars but I just lost the feeling of joy I used to get when I sat down with a book. I had no problem reading for my classes - being tested on my knowledge of the text made the effort feel worthwhile - but it wasn't until I got interested in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman that the wheels were set into motion that would lead to me reading a book every week in 2020.

I really wanted to read Thinking, Fast and Slow, having just taken a class on human perception - I needed to know more about cognitive biases. Unfortunately I was in the middle of my Master's program and felt that I had no time to read. So I did the unthinkable and downloaded the Audible app. There's a common feeling (which I felt for many years) that audio is a poor medium for consuming books. It was slowly finishing Daniel Kahneman's bestseller on my frigid walks between classes that made me realize that, in certain conditions, I can process text just as well with my ears.

The real spark came three or four audiobooks in when I felt a desire to start reading books with my eyes again. I read a few more books in 2019 and when the last week of the year rolled around, I decided that I wanted to challenge myself so I set a goal to read a different book every week in 2020. In many ways the process was easier than I expected and on the last day of 2020, I read the final chapter of Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and achieved my goal. The exact text from the Google Keep note where I wrote down my goal says "Read 52 books" which, since I missed many weeks, was conveniently more lax than a new book every week. I read these books as a mix of physical book, e-book, and audiobook - I was almost always reading multiple books at once.

I'm really glad I set this goal in 2019. I learned a lot and pivoted much of my leisure time in a positive direction. The experience even had a positive social impact - I participated in two different book clubs throughout the year and facilitated a third, and from April to June, I participated in a book-a-week challenge at work which kept me motivated to hit the halfway mark. When COVID-19 lockdowns began in March, reading helped me stay grounded. In the end, the biggest outcome was the re-ignition of the joy of reading. I don't think I'll be aiming for 52 books a year in 2021 - one downside was that I avoided reading longer books (looking at you Dune) - but I'm very much looking forward to reading every week.

I'll talk about my top 5 books of the year next. Further down, you'll find all the books I read with my 1-5 rating of each.

Top 5 Books

Narrowing down to my top five books of the year was really tough and in some ways arbitrary. I tried to include books that were fairly different from each other. Here are some of the runners up:

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells - A viscerally horrifying depiction of the consequences and causes of global warming.
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein - An elegant application of the principles of Intersectional Feminism to data science.
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin - A beautiful yet haunting story of love and loss, set in 1970s Harlem.

The top five books are all excellent and I certainly can't choose between them so I've listed them here in the order I read them. I encourage you to read all of them - there's a lot to enjoy in each.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I don't think I quite understood the beauty and intellectual potential of classic sci-fi until I read Brave New World. The novel describes a dystopian society with a strict intelligence-based hierarchy. Along the way, it describes several components of the society which, on their own, are ethically dubious at best and terrifying at worst, but work together to describe a society that successfully maximizes the average pleasure and satisfaction of its citizens. It was this proof by construction, that a utilitarian society which optimizes for the average quality of life is doomed to fail, that really struck me about the book. The book inspired lots of questions like:

What qualities should we be optimizing for in our society?
What qualities do our leaders optimize for today?
Can we build a good society without clear optimization parameters?
Are there unquantifiable things that we want our society to promote?

I haven't read too much dystopian fiction (I've never read 1984!) and I imagine my interpretation of Brave New World would be different if I had, but I loved Huxley's vivid and textured language so much that I read his book The Doors of Perception next and picked up Island to read in the future.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

After the murder of George Floyd, I spent some time trying to understand my place in our society and my complicity in its most horrifying institutions. Of the books I read at the time, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander rose to the top because it crisply showed that the progress that I had felt our society has made in the past 50 years was an illusion. Going deeper, Alexander demonstrates how the mirage of progress is actively harmful toward achieving real racial justice in America and how policy decisions can have unexpected broad and long lasting impacts.

In hindsight, I think part of the reason I rated this book so highly was that it described deeply flawed institutions that I wanted to help fix but, critically, that I didn't feel a personal responsibility for perpetuating, even as a white man. With that in mind, I strongly recommend reading The New Jim Crow in conjunction with other books on anti-racism to remind yourself that you, as someone who was socialized in a racialized society, have a responsibility to identify and work to improve your racism. I personally recommend Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates - it's a beautifully written first person depiction of the impact of institutional and systemic racism. I also really liked How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. You can find more resources on anti-racism here.

The Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

There's a lot to love about Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi's exploration of Alfred Adler's philosophy and psychotherapeutic method. The book is structured as a Socratic dialogue and has no problem poking fun at the format, but it quickly becomes a compelling argument for a unique approach to life happiness. The central thesis is that self-love and relational empathy are the most important components of a good life. This idea came at an important time in my life - I had been struggling with anxiety surrounding a big transition at work and The Courage to be Disliked reminded me what's truly important in my life and to no small degree helped me make it through.

Although it helped me a lot, I like The Courage to be Disliked less as a universally applicable method for living a happy life and more as a collection of insights to integrate into one's own moral framework and interpersonal behavior. Two nuggets that I particularly liked were "All problems are interpersonal relationship problems" and "Focus on your life tasks". A note of caution: the book disagrees with commonly accepted notions of trauma which may be triggering for you (it was for me to a degree). With that said, the book was overall very compelling and, even with its flaws, I strongly recommend it for anyone looking to be kinder and happier in their lives.

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is a genius. His stories are beautiful, moving, and very difficult to set down. Exhalation: Stories is a collection of nine short stories of varying length and in different universes, touching on topics from time travel to non carbon-based life. They vary in plausibility but each is vivid and soulful and Chiang manages to inspire introspection with each story. I personally particularly liked "Omphalos", a story set in a modern day Earth with abundant physical evidence of young-earth creationism. I also really liked "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom", a clever, almost plausible story featuring a commercial device that allows people to communicate with versions of themselves in other universes.

I put Exhalation on my top five list but Chiang's other collection of short stories Stories of Your Life and Others easily could have made it on to this list. In fact, Stories of Your Life contains the short story that the movie Arrival is based on (the story is better than the movie, in my opinion). I've yet to read any work of Chiang's that I dislike and I'm eagerly looking forward to reading everything he publishes in the future.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World was the last book I read in 2020 and I only wish I read it sooner. I usually try to avoid self-help books but Cal Newport, a CS professor and all around insightful guy, makes such a compelling argument for the erosion of our lives by technology that I have to put this book among my favorites. Newport describes how modern tech products and particularly those in the attention economy like Facebook and Twitter have sneakily turned us into pleasure addicts. This varies from person to person, but as I reflected on the impact of technology in my life, I realized that I had become a sort of techno-zombie, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Newport's book is particularly good because it doesn't attempt to provide one-size-fits-all solutions. It gives some exercises to help you identify the role of technology in your life and to sort out the valuable bits from the toxic ones, but it encourages you to find the right place for technology in your life. Reading this book is what inspired and motivated me to write this reflection and to be intentional with my leisure time. I think every person living in the 21st century will find the ideas in this book valuable.

All 52 Books

Here's the list of every book I read this year, in order of reading. Please note that the ratings I've associated with each book carry some context. I tried to rate the books relative to others in the genre - for example, I gave Bossy Pants a 4/5 because it was a funny and insightful memoir, but I would recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' beautiful novel The Water Dancer (which I also gave a 4/5) well before it. There are also many genres that I haven't explored in depth - Data Feminism for example was a powerful and valuable read but seeing as it was among my first forays into contemporary Feminist thought, it's possible that I would have rated it lower with more context.

Happy City by Charles Montgomery: 4/5
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: 4/5
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell: 2/5
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells: 5/5
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman: 4/5
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton: 3.5/5
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh: 4/5
The Overstory by Richard Powers: 3/5
Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War by Steve Inskeep: 3/5
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann: 3/5
Calypso by David Sedaris: 4/5
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by Michael Braungart and William McDonough: 3/5
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: 5/5
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley: 3/5
How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci: 4/5
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight: 2/5
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace: 4/5
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: 4.5/5
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates: 4/5
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo: 4.5/5
How to be an Anti-racist by Ibram X. Kendi: 4/5
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino: 4/5
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander: 5/5
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: 4.5/5
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J. K. Rowling: 3/5
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan: 4/5
Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World by Annie Lowrey: 3.5/5
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin: 5/5
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump: 2.5/5
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin: 4/5
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner: 3.5/5
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman: 4.5/5
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: 3.5/5
The Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi: 5/5
The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger: 4/5
Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia: 3.5/5
Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang: 5/5
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas: 4.5/5
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart: 4.5/5
What I Believe by Bertrand Russell: 4.5/5
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink: 2/5
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett: 4.5/5
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: 5/5
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris: 4/5
The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children by Katherine Stewart: 4/5
Bossypants by Tina Fey: 4/5
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie: 4.5/5
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks: 3.5/5
Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance: 2/5
Less by Andrew Sean Greer: 4.5/5
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein: 5/5
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport: 5/5