A Year's Worth of Reading
Year-end book report
I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.
— Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 10, 1815.[1]
A Rarity – A Resolution Kept.
Last year at about this time (late December, 2022), I made a New Year’s resolution. Several really, but one of them – to read 50 books, just under a book per week – I kept. My goal was to diversify my intake of reading matter. I felt, correctly as it turned out, that I could capture the time for my reading project by breaking the wearisome habit of “doomscrolling” – that obsessive refreshing of social media, often in the perverse hope of finding something upsetting or alarming, which swallows evenings and raises blood pressure.
I’ve just finished my fiftieth book. I’ve read non-fiction and fiction, new titles and classics, erudite works and popular books. Some titles have been of professional interest, and several were relevant to my ongoing research project in the economic history of California and the Pacific Basin. Some of the fiction was literary, some more breezily popular, with a healthy dose of escapism – mysteries and thrillers. Some I found while browsing our own bookshelves, and some while browsing in bookstores. I borrowed several from the library. A few were gifts, and several were recommendations from erudite friends. The full list, in the order in which I read these books, appears at the end of this note.
When I finished each book, I wrote a note to myself about it. The full collection runs about 11,000 words, and they are not all interesting. But there were some clear highlights, and a couple of notable clinkers, too. Here is a sampling.
Fiction.
My friends know that my taste in fiction runs toward the 19th Century, and that my favorite writers are Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Arthur Conan Doyle. I had re-read the Sherlock Holmes canon during 2022, so Conan Doyle was not on my list for 2023. But Dickens and Clemens were, with Oliver Twist (1837) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). My comments:
— Oliver Twist: A great story by a great writer. Somehow, I had never read it through. Oliver Twist is a literary romance of degradation, struggle, and redemption. The descriptions of the nether world of London are, of course, Dickensian, and provide an early example of how the author sensitized what was probably mostly a genteel readership to the squalor and misery of so much of the city. The trajectories of most of the principal characters satisfy the requirements of romance, yet not all are extreme. There’s a reason we still read Dickens nearly two centuries on.
— Huckleberry Finn: This was, I think, the second time I’ve read Huckleberry Finn since I first read it in high school. At this point I can’t quite decide whether it’s the great American novel or a string of set-pieces, like Tom Sawyer. Either way, it’s a richly-textured look at the life and sensibilities of the antebellum South. It’s most notable in the matter-of-fact way the characters regard slavery as a normal condition of life. Huck Finn keeps telling himself that he ought to feel guilty for helping deprive Miss Watson of her property (Jim), but he can’t quite get there. In the final chapters, Tom Sawyer knows that Miss Watson has freed Jim in her will, but he still thinks nothing of playing a series of abusive tricks on Jim, mainly for his own amusement.
Two other titles on my fiction list complemented Huckleberry Finn in a surprising way. These were Daniel DeFoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924). I picked up Robinson Crusoe because my research had led me to the story of Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway widely regarded as the model for Crusoe. It’s a pretty good adventure story, but what’s most striking in it today is the racism. Robinson Crusoe represents the 18th-century mindset of Europeans, and especially the English, regarding the indigenous peoples they were encountering in increasing numbers as they expanded their colonial reach. DeFoe has Crusoe describe his circumstances in a straightforward way, and that’s how he describes Friday (the islander he rescues from a rival group and befriends) and his people, too. Of course they were naked, warlike savages, and cannibals to boot. Why wouldn’t they be? They had never heard the Gospel. Or something like that.
If Mark Twain satirized racial attitudes, and DeFoe took them for granted, Forster was somewhere in the middle. Forster’s title must at least be a nod to that last gasp of the American Transcendentalists, Whitman’s poem of the same name, which suggested that technology – the Transcontinental Railroad and Suez Canal, both of which opened in 1869, would unite humanity. Several of Forster’s characters do traverse the Suez Canal, but the farthest from India we see any of them is Venice. There’s something impressionistic about the novel, especially the scenes of the Marabar Caves and the festival of the birth of Krishna. With knowledge of how the century since the publication of this novel has played out, it’s easy – a little facile, really – to read it as being about the difficulties (on all sides) of the Raj, and the mental constructs all parties involved used to deal with those unlike them. Forster to me seems to be testing the limits of Whitman’s one-world optimism, which has its moments: Dr. Aziz and Mrs. Moore in the mosque; the sometimes friendship between Aziz and Fielding; the capsized boats at the festival. But life intrudes, and they don’t last. Forster seems matter-of-fact about the Christianity of his English characters and respectful of the Islam of Aziz and his friends. My impression, though, is that he genuinely admired Hinduism, perhaps as offering something closest to that transcendental ideal, while recognizing in its constant seeking that human life does not admit of its realization.
I also read a bit of modernist fiction, which played with time, memory, history, romance, and tragedy in a variety of ways. Best of these titles was Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2022). Its premise concerns the artificial creation of the world of the past. It begins with a memory clinic, built on the notion that memory patients might recover somewhat in an environment reminiscent of an apartment, or even a city, of their youth. Gospodinov also plays effectively with the blurry boundary between his own imagination and that of his first-person narrator. Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023) builds a mythical city in medieval India, in which artificial memories underpin its history and culture. Haruki Murakami’s After Dark (2004) is a spare, surrealistic Japanese novel set in Tokyo one late night in October of some unspecified, recent year. At one level, it explores how space, time, and reality itself change in the overnight hours, but there’s quite a bit more wonderful weirdness to the novel. Also on the modernist spectrum were Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
My list includes a good deal of crime fiction and a couple of thrillers. They were entertaining, but I’ll say no more than that I would most recommend Juan Gómez-Jurado’s Red Queen (2023), Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023), Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1933), and for sheer, brilliant writing, Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942).
Top Choice.
The best book I read this year was George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). It had been on my list of books to read since I was doing research for context for my analysis of the London-based joint stock companies formed in the 1850s ostensibly to develop gold quartz mines on Frémont’s Mariposa estate. In that research I encountered Mary Poovey’s paper[2] analyzing the novel in terms of its “financial plot” and “sentimental plot.”
The Mill on the Floss may be the greatest of the 19th century English pastoral novels. In certain ways it is also most modern. It is not a romance, but a tragedy. Its milieu is not the (sometimes impecunious) landed gentry, but the mercantile class. Even the structure of the tragedy is modern: The tragic protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, is not royal, or even noble, but the daughter of a family in the lower echelons of the mercantile class. Her fatal flaw, if she has one, is human frailty, which overwhelms a generally good nature. At the end, she emulates the town’s namesake saint, to her doom.
The novel an unusually well-crafted, subtle financial plot. Maggie’s father has lost their principal asset, Dorlcote Mill, through borrowings and injudicious litigation. Her brother Tom, a hard man of business, rescues the family’s honor and recovers the mill. But he is an ambiguous figure. He and Maggie have always had a difficult relationship. He is also compromised. As a teenager, his first contribution to the defense of the family fortune at the time of their father’s bankruptcy is an act of fraudulent conveyance.
The depth of the financial plot permits an economic analysis of the novel as interesting as the literary one. Capital is a key element of the financial plot. The Tulliver family’s only considerable capital asset was the mill; a cash call of a few hundred pounds - the income of perhaps a year - was enough to ruin the family financially. Tom’s and Maggie’s mother, and her sisters, clearly regard their own finest linens, china, and such as part of their own capital. They never use them, but talk about them constantly, suggesting that they serve as stocks of both financial and social capital. Tom borrows a sum from his uncle to launch his first venture, since his own family has gone broke.
For the Tullivers and their contemporaries, there were two principal stores of value: Mr Tulliver’s tin box holding some sovereigns and banknotes, and substantial capital assets like the mill. Tulliver could borrow from his neighbors against the mill, but default meant being “sold up,” with the bailiff auctioning both the mill and Mrs Tulliver’s linens and china. How much better for savers is today’s system, in which the deep, liquid, public capital market offers the productive economy as a whole as the store of value, and a source of gain! Yet in Eliot’s time (around 1860), investments in shares of joint-stock companies were highly speculative, and diversification was nearly impossible. In such a world, perhaps a tin box full of sovereigns really was a proper savings vehicle, and perhaps my answer to my gold bug friends rests more heavily than I had realized on the depth and liquidity of modern capital markets.
Russia.
Bridging fiction and non-fiction on my list this year were titles about Russia. My first book this year was Weiss and Brown, Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin (2022), a sort of explanatory biography of Putin, in the form of a graphic novel. My fiftieth was Gregory J. Wallance, Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal Frozen Heart of Russia (2023). History is a conversation between the past and the present, and these two titles make that point neatly. Wallance describes a journey to Siberia in the 1880s by George Kennan to investigate the Russian system of exiling criminals and political opponents to prisons and work camps in Siberia. Our interest in the Russian autocrats of the 19th Century would be of a different character if we weren’t dealing with another Russian autocrat in the 21st.
Until I picked up The Mill on the Floss, I thought my top choice for the year was going to be Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff (1876). This was an adventure romance, set in Russia in the 1860s or 70s. It’s Verne at his best, taking the reader to a distant corner of the earth, embedding the travels in a compelling story with just the right mix of swashbuckling drama. Verne, remarkably, captured in the character of Michael Strogoff a classic Russian sentimental romanticism, although he deviated from the Russians in two important respects: He had about 250 too few characters, and everything came out right in the end.
One of the more remarkable books I read this year was Josh Haven, The Siberia Job (2023), a somewhat fictionalized (he’s coy about just how much he’s fictionalized it) account of a big score by two partners, one American and one Czech, who horn in on the privatization of one of the giant Russian oil or gas companies in the period just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The partners buy up vouchers for shares in the pseudonymous Gazneft, managing to turn up at the obscure times and places appointed for the exchange of the vouchers for shares. In so doing, they rouse the violent ire of the parties that thought they had the business wired, but since the IMF had something of a supervisory role, in the end they are able to carry it off. It’s a bit of a “Wild East” tale – and a page-turner. The last couple of chapters suggest that given opposition from Russian oligarchs, their big score did not yield for the protagonists a quiet life.
Finally, I read one piece of serious scholarship about Russia: David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (2010). I picked up the title because I had known the author in college. He has passed away, sadly, but I was glad to read his work. The book catalogues (in eye-glazing detail at times) the Orientalism of a cast of Russian writers, artists, composers, scholars, and political figures over a span of more than two centuries. At the very least, it reminds us that if we want to understand Russia and Russians, we will fail if we imagine them as purely European. David also spends more than a little time relating his subject to Russian autocracy, making me wonder whether he was one of those underground monarchists of whom I knew a few at Yale.
Non-Fiction.
I read a variety of non-fiction this year, some fascinating, some disappointing. Two were “big ideas” titles: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
Greenblatt’s book turns on the discovery in 1417 or 1418 of a lost manuscript of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura by Poggio Bracciolini, an unemployed former secretary of the recently-deposed Pope John XXIII. Greenblatt begins by asserting that the discovery of Lucretius’s manuscript led to a revival of interest in Epicurianism, and opened the way to the Renaissance. The book ends up being an engaging biography of Bracciolini and an interesting history from late antiquity to the medieval period, but it never quite makes the argument that the rediscovery of Lucretius triggered the Renaissance. In the last chapter Greenblatt, as though recognizing that gap, rehearses a litany of Renaissance ideas that relate to Lucretius, and in particular to his exposition of a theory of atomism. Oddly, Greenblatt’s failure to back up his initial assertion doesn’t feel like much of a weakness, because the rest of the history, and of the analysis, is so interesting and so strong.
The phrase “tipping point” has passed into our lexicon, possibly because lots of people have heard of Gladwell’s book, but certainly not because lots have read it. Gladwell presents a not-entirely-persuasive picture of how popular ideas go viral. He starts by claiming that ideas diffuse in a population in the same way epidemics do, but never mentions any findings about epidemics. He cherry-picks data from a variety of experiments in psychology and sociology, and he wades into the shallow end of evolutionary psychology to explain, well, something. My hunch is that Gladwell’s intention was to show policy-makers how to think about effecting large changes with minimal resources, but the most coherent parts of the book amount to a manual for cynically manipulating public opinion.
The notable non-fiction titles on this year’s list include Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics (2016), and Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann (2021). Alexander’s memoir and Bhattacharya’s biography both tackle the fraught task of explaining abstract scientific concepts to a general audience, and both succeed.
Naturally, I read a good deal of history, much of which tied into my own research project. Notably bad was Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002). Menzies comes across as a hack, crashing his way through a story that’s too big, and trying to make an industry of it. Menzies has clearly fallen in love with his subject (probably a requirement for an amateur historian, and I’ll plead guilty myself to that charge), but he has also fallen in love with his hypothesis, which leads to all sorts of trouble. Much of his narrative is in first person - not about what his historical characters did, but about what he did to scrounge up evidence that agrees with his hypothesis.
At the other end of the spectrum was Andrés Reséndez, Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery (2021). It tells the story of the discovery of the Vuelta, which I’ve known as the tornaviaje, the route of return for Spanish trading galleons crossing the Pacific from the Philippines back to Acapulco. A more-or-less secret squadron of four ships left the purpose-built port of Navidad (evidently a pestilential place) on the Pacific coast of Mexico in 1565, to reach the Philippines, establish a Spanish presence there, and most importantly, find a way back across the Pacific, rather than by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage seems relatively well-known, but the revisionist part of Reséndez’s analysis is to credit Lope Martín, the mulatto pilot of the smallest ship in the squadron, with being first to return successfully. This is a good example of careful history presented for a general audience. I had the good fortune to make Andrés’s acquaintance. Coffee with him one afternoon at the Huntington Library was one of the highlights of my year.
I’ll also highlight David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 (1977). This is a bit of a tome, but tells the story of the personalities, finances, technologies, and trials of the building of the Panama Canal in a way that is both careful and engaging for a general audience. It is a model of popular history.
Back in medieval history, Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (2021) make their main point, that “Dark Ages” is a ghastly misnomer, convincingly. But since their book covers a millennium and pretty much all of Eurasia, they suffer disadvantages as storytellers. They present, in engaging fashion, a number of vignettes supportive of both their main point and several subsidiary points. I take for granted that their scholarship runs much deeper - one appealing feature of this book is that it displays depth of scholarship without having to hit the reader over the head with it.
Naturally, I couldn’t escape economic history and the California Gold Rush. The economic history titles I read were somewhat disappointing, but the one Gold Rush title was worth reading. H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (2002) covers the period from the discovery of gold (1848) to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (1869). He argues that California gold catalyzed important changes throughout American life, largely by tying gold to the Compromise of 1850, the Civil War, and the Railroad.
Conclusion.
One of the benefits of reading widely and deeply is that it provides material from which to form connections, and possibly new ideas. The Russia titles brought into relief the mix of tragic romanticism and autocracy that run through that country’s history and literature. DeFoe, Mark Twain, and Forester together show how deeply racial attitudes run in western culture. McCulloch, Brands, Reséndez, and even Menzies and George Eliot, give different perspectives on the importance of trade and commerce in economic life and history.
Best of all, the broadening effect of all that reading replaced, or at least counteracted, the narrowing effect of too much time on social media. Reading is the ultimate subversive activity. I recommend it.
— Jonathan Tiemann
Menlo Park, California
December 24, 2023
[1] The note concerns books Jefferson had given the Library of Congress to replace some of what the British had destroyed during the War of 1812. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/217.html.
[2] Mary Poovey, “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment,” Victorian Studies, Vol 45, Autumn 2002, pp. 17-41. blinking cursor on a fresh blank page can be intimidating for even seasoned writers. Here are some tips from our Partnerships team on how to go about your first Substack post:
The Books.
1. Andrew S. Weiss and Brian Brown. Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin. 2022.
2. Willie Mays and John Shea, introduction by Bob Costas. 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid. 2020.
3. Gavin Menzies. 1421: The Year China Discovered America. 2002.
4. John Elderfield. Manet and the Execution of Maximilian. 2006.
5. Barry Eisler. Amok: A Dox Thriller. 2022.
6. Jules Verne. Michael Strogoff. 1876.
7. Edward Chancellor. The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest. 2022.
8. Ray Perman. The Rise and Fall of the City of Money: A Financial History of Edinburgh. 2019.
9. Haruki Murakami, tr. Jay Rubin. After Dark. 2004.
10. Andrés Reséndez. Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery. 2021.
11. Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist. 1837.
12. Paul Oyer. An Economist Goes to the Game: How to throw away $580 million and other surprising insights from the economics of sports. 2022.
13. Meryle Secrest. Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers. 2001.
14. Matthew Gabriele, David M. Perry. The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe. 2021.
15. Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz. Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House. 2020.
16. Daniel DeFoe. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719.
17. Stephen Greenblatt. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. 2011.
18. Rex Stout. Gambit. 1964.
19. Mario Livio. The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number. 2002.
20. E.M. Forster. A Passage to India. 1924.
21. Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall. 2009.
22. Steven Ujifusa. Barons of the Sea – And their race to build the world’s fastest clipper ship. 2019.
23. Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884.
24. Stephon Alexander. The Jazz of Physics. 2016.
25. Georgi Gospodinov, tr. Angela Rodel. Time Shelter. 2022.
26. Marion Turner. The Wife of Bath: A Biography. 2023.
27. Eleanor Catton. Birnam Wood. 2023.
28. John Banville. Marlowe (originally The Black-Eyed Blonde). 2014.
29. Juan Gómez-Jurado, tr. Nick Caistor, Red Queen. 2023.
30. Chris Laoutaris. Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare. 2023.
31. Elmore Leonard. Out of Sight. 1996.
32. Irene Vallejo, tr. Charlotte Whittle. Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. 2023.
33. Rex Stout. If Death Ever Slept. 1957.
34. Joseph Brennan. Paniolo. 1978.
35. Ananyo Bhattacharya. The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann. 2021.
36. H.W. Brands. The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. 2002.
37. Josh Haven. The Siberia Job. 2023.
38. Salman Rushdie. Victory City. 2023.
39. Dashiell Hammett. The Thin Man. 1933.
40. George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss. 1860.
41. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration. 2010.
42. Walter Mosley. Devil in a Blue Dress. 1990.
43. Jonathan Levy. Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States. 2022.
44. Jonathan Lethem. Brooklyn Crime Novel. 2023.
45. David McCullough. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914. 1977.
46. Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925.
47. Umberto Eco, tr. William Weaver. The Name of the Rose. 1980.
48. Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. 2000.
49. Raymond Chandler. The High Window. 1942.
Gregory J. Wallance. Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal Frozen Heart of Russia. 2023.
A wonderfully eclectic selection and interesting commentary. The Mill on the Floss, huh? Who knew!