The Year in Books, 2023

Here’s this year’s recap of notable books I read, featuring Russians new and old, Scythians (all old), and criminals of various sorts. (Previous years: 2022, 2021, …, 2015.)

1965 vs. 2023

I wrote a few months ago about my excursion into 1965, reading seven books published in that year. I won’t revisit any of these here except to note again that Claude Brown’s memoir of growing up in Harlem in the mid-twentieth century, Manchild in the Promised Land, and John Fowles’ novel, The Magus, were phenomenal.

How does 1965 compare to the present? This year I read four books published in 2023 — for me,an unusually large number of contemporary books. Overall these were not as good as my 1965 selections. Perhaps only the better books of 1965 remain in our consciousness; perhaps getting published in 1965 was harder so there was a higher bar for quality; perhaps the writers of 1965 were better; or perhaps this is simply chance and a different set of books from 2023 would have dazzled me.

The best of the bunch was In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark, by Jonathan Garfinkel, which I chose semi-randomly from the University of Oregon library’s Popular Reading collection . The novel follows young Georgians before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is excellent until a rushed last quarter.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton tells of a group of idealistic New Zealanders that covertly plants crops on other people’s land and meets an eccentric tech billionaire. I found it tedious and uninteresting; I ended up skimming about a third.

The Scythian Empire by Christopher I. Beckwith was also tedious, but I stuck with it, spending quite a bit of time with both the audiobook and the physical book, though I still don’t know what to make of it. The Scythians, about whom I was completely ignorant, were “an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia,” according to Wikipedia. The author makes the case that their vast domain constituted an empire that bequeathed everything from government structure to clothing to the civilizations that followed it, like the Persians and the Chinese. I’m not enough of an expert to assess the strength of the argument. From what I’ve read elsewhere, it’s contentious, and the evidence presented here, repeated ad nauseam, seems sparse. The epilogue is fascinating, claiming that the simultaneous onset of classical philosophy in Greece, the Near East (Zoroastrianism), India, and China is not coincidence, but due to Scythian influence. The evidence for this seems especially weak. The book’s main idea, though, that nearly all ancient civilizations had a Scythian root, is a fascinating one.

Finally, I read the recent pop-science book In a Flock of Starlings by the 2022 Physics Nobel Prize winner Georgio Parisi. Parisi’s work is creative and brilliant, and we certainly need more books that showcase the beauty and importance of complex systems, but this one is disappointing. It’s a very short, about 90 small pages, mix of physics and historical recollections. The lay descriptions of physical phenomena and insights are fine, but Parisi lapses frequently into jargon like “blackbody radiation” that one shouldn’t expect the general public to know. The anecdotes and historical accounts are interesting, but there are not many of them. One gets the sense Parisi would be a wonderful person to have coffee with, but that’s not enough motivation for a book. It could have been so much better, and given Parisi’s fame, a better book could have had a real impact!

This reminds me that I’ve been looking back at my own pop-science book, So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World, since I’ll be teaching my “biophysics for non-science-majors” class next term, for the first time since the book was published! There’s a lot in it that I’ve never covered in a class, especially about biotechnologies and reading/writing genes (and associated controversies); I’m excited to see how it goes! The paperback edition should be out in March, 2024 (US), and the Chinese and possibly other translations should also be published in the coming year.

Fiction

Other than The Magus and Stoner, noted in an earlier post, here are some highlights of the past year:

• Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (1996). Entrancing, fable-like stories spanning recent Polish history. The author won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature.
• Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817). I corrected my deficiency of never having read anything by Jane Austen. It was very good.
• The Secret Pilgrim by John LeCarre (1990). Short stories about spies and British intelligence, taking place over decades. Beautiful writing and thoughtful examinations of people’s actions and motivations.
• Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (1917). A family settles in the Norwegian wilderness. Modernity approaches; a colored pencil is amazing and treasured. We like to think that we’re currently experiencing the most monumental changes to human civilization, but multiple eras have seen monumental changes. The book is calm and hypnotic — I suspected that it slowed me down slightly on long runs.
• The Suffrage of Elvira by V. S. Naipaul (1958). A short novel about an election in a small town in Trinidad. Very funny, and a neat glimpse into a mix of cultures, characters, and the web of corruption and patronage that everyone seems to find quite normal in the operation of an election.
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (2005). A drug deal gone awry near the Mexican border in Texas. A missing $2M. A psychopath hunting whoever has the money. Meditations on fate and chance.

The last two, like nearly 40% of the books I consumed this year, were audiobooks (via the public library’s Hoopla service, as always) and had excellent narrators conveying Trinidadian voices or providing the pacing that Cormac McCarthy’s lack of punctuation can make challenging.

Also as audiobooks: novels #4-13 in Richard Stark’s Parker series of pulp crime novels. This bunch was published between 1963 and 1971. They’re short, and while none in isolation is great literature, the combined effect of efficient, fast-moving, tales of heists, plans, and doublecrosses is impressive and fun. The best of #4-13 bunch is The Handle (1966), book #8 in the series. (Parker is hired by mobsters to eliminate an offshore casino; the feds lean on him to deliver the casino owner.)

Non-fiction

There were so many excellent non-fiction books I read, it’s hard to pick highlights. Continuing the theme of criminals, but this time criminals who run a country:

• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (2009) gives fascinating accounts of the lives of North Koreans. There are so many stunning, terrible, and amazing vignettes: working for 10 hours in a factory with an additional 3 hours of propaganda lectures every day; a father being subjected to three days of interrogation by the police for wishing out loud that boots were available for his kids; starving kindergartners and their heartbroken teacher; refusal to acknowledge US food aid as being donated by the US; seeing an American nail clipper and being stunned that such a wonderful object could exist. The author interviewed defectors, and also relates their challenges in escaping (Mongolia is helpful, if you can get there!) and in building a new life in South Korea (avoiding scams, for example). Depressing and infuriating that the North Korean regime continues to exist, but also exhilarating and at times uplifting.
• The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden (2021). A clear, thought-provoking, and fascinating book about genetic influences on socially meaningful outcomes like education — their existence, their importance, and what the author thinks we should do about them. The author presents excellent descriptions of genetics, including how we know what we know from things like sibling studies and GWAS studies. The major points are that genetics has a huge impact on life outcomes, and that we should take this seriously if we want to improve people’s lives or change society. The author firmly believes that it would be a mistake to sweep genetic research under the rug for misguided but well-meaning reasons; this seems obvious, but it is radical in current social science. She implores us to stop wasting time, money, talent, and tools that could be used to improve people’s lives; to properly identify causes and design effective interventions, one needs to know and acknowledge biological correlates. Harden is scathing about the efficacy of most interventions to date, especially regarding education. She also notes that taking genetics seriously has perhaps surprising consequences for what we consider a fair society; we shouldn’t mistake being genetically lucky for being good. Harden is extremely egalitarian, and I disagree with some of the views near the end about the aim of equity for a society. The book overall is excellent.
• Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane (2022). On biochemistry, metabolism, and the origins of life, this book makes biochemistry seem more sensible and fundamental than anything I’ve read before. Very dense, but fascinating, enlightening, and unique. I should revisit it and write more some time.
• The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov (2013). Perhaps the most fun book on the highlights list. The amazing true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a Black American born in 1872 who left the U.S., worked as a high-end waiter in many European cities, and found his way to Moscow where he became an immensely successful owner of restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs. The book does a wonderful job of describing the environments of both post-Civil War Mississippi, where his parents, former slaves, become landowners, and pre-Revolution Russia. Interestingly, in Russia he is free from racial discrimination, but then suffers from vicious class-based discrimination as the Bolsheviks take power. The twists and turns of the story are enthralling — if it were fiction, it would seem implausible! (I’d write more, but I don’t want to spoil it for others.) Riveting, and great illustration of the tumultuousness of history and the successes and failures that result from trying to ride its waves.
• The Amur River: Between Russia and China by Colin Thubron (2021). The 80-year-old traveler recounts his journey from Mongolia to Russia to China. Key lesson: Russia seems like a miserable place. (I’ve read several books in the past few years on contemporary Russia; none seem cheery or optimistic.)

Graphic novels and comics

Of the seven comic books / graphic novels I read, the only one worth noting is the excellent Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? by Matt Fraction and Steve Leiber (Illustrator) (2020). It’s an extremely fractured, fantastical, silly, yet coherent tale of the misadventures of Jimmy Olsen, who someone is trying to kill. Its self-awareness could easily have been annoying but it’s so consistently fun, with clever jokes, great visuals, and an actual story, that it works.

What will 2024 bring? Probably more crime and more audiobooks; perhaps a cheery Russian travelogue?

Today’s illustration…

Smith Rock, based on a photo I took a while ago. The rocks look much better in real life.

— Raghuveer Parthasarathy, December 31, 2023