Some memorable books I read this year, unordered:

Best:

The World as Will and Representation - Arthur Schopenhauer

• Schopenhauer tells the reader that this book is one thought expressed in four parts and that they won’t understand it without reading it twice. This is also true of my posts, which when read correctly can be understood to complete German idealism.

Class - Paul Fussel

• A taxonomy of social class in 1980s America. For example, Fussel on cats: “Upper-class cats, the equivalent of poodles in the dog world, are those held to originate in such exotic places (that is, expensive to get to) as Burma and the Himalayas. If you are upper-middle class you’ll be tempted to name the cat ‘Cat’ [or Spinoza or Candide—showing off your education reveals the need to show off.] Middles go in for Siamese cats, proles for alley cats, which they name ‘Puss.’”

• Fails to engage with post-Marxist critiques of class primacy.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs

• This book was so good that cities overcorrected and now need a few remedial Robert Moseses. She’s probably still right about Quebecois separatism.

Rabbit Run - John Updike

• My mom meant to get a copy of this for my birthday and got me Watership Down instead.

Globalists and Crack-up Capitalism - Quinn Slobodian

• From Crack-up Capitalism, on David (son of Milton) Friedman’s LARPing: “...David [son of Milton] Friedman’s work was hard to separate from his extracurricular persona as an early-twelfth-century upper-class Berber named Duke Cariadoc of the Bow… In persona as Cariadoc, Friedman forwent glasses, used only his right hand to eat, always followed the name of God with an honorific, and sometimes followed the name of a dead non-Muslim with ‘curses on him for an unbeliever.’”

Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach/The Last Psychiatrist

• Teach presents a compelling case for developing mania. It contains:

  • Hundreds of pages of psychoanalytic review of the New Testament and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, some of which is so obviously wrong that it isn't worth engaging with (he spends ~40 pages trying to reinterpret the "fishers of men" comment from Mark, admits there’s no payoff, and never brings it up again.)

  • This quote, which is never explained: "Within days of the U.S. Federal Reserve beginning its gigantic third round of bond purchases-- 5 years after the first and double the amount-- the comedy group Lonely Island released a song called 'YOLO: You Only Live Once.'"

  • 30 pages of screenplay for a trailer for a fictional pornographic movie, accompanied by sheet music.

Herzog - Saul Bellow

• Becoming Moses Herzog is my best-case outcome if I get into grad school.

The Black Jacobins - C. L. R. James

Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges

The Theology of Liberalism - Eric Nelson

The Years - Annie Ernaux

Worst:

Map and Territory - Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Chronically reddit.

Book Lovers - Emily Henry

• This doesn’t have enough books or lovers to justify its 400 pages.

The Madams of San Francisco - Curt Gentry

• Somehow Gentry manages to make a book on the history of prostitution in San Francisco boring.

• One anecdote I did like: In 1850, Louis Napoleon announced that he was running a lottery (“The Lottery of the Golden Ingots”) to fund the passage of hardworking but impoverished Frenchmen to California and its gold rush. Instead, his government pocketed the money and used the lottery as a pretext to deport a bunch of undesirables, especially prostitutes. This formed the basis of San Francisco’s French population (“lingotiers.”)