Podcast guest author appreciation post.

I’ve been hosting my podcast at the Athletic (iTunes, Spotify) for over three and a half years now, and I’ve had the privilege of interviewing a number of authors whose work I’ve enjoyed. Of course, I boost their books on the show and on the site formerly known as Twitter, but I wanted to create a more lasting spot where you can find all of the books I’ve discussed on the podcast, allowing me to thank the authors once more for their time.

I’ve listed the book(s) I discussed with the authors on their episodes; it’s not an exhaustive bibliography and in some cases it’s not even my favorite book by that particular author. If a book is on this list, however, I have read it, and I recommend it. I’ve loosely organized them into categories, although some of them defied easy categorization. I’ll try to update this somewhat regularly as well.

All links go to Bookshop.org; if you order through those links I receive a small commission.

Business

Oliver Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

John A. List – The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.

Children’s Books

Matthew Cherry – Hair Love.

Cooking

Michael Ruhlman – The Book of Cocktail Ratios, Ruhlman’s Twenty.

Nik Sharma – The Flavor Equation.

Culture

Matt Singer – Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever.

Fiction

Jasper Fforde – The Constant Rabbit.

Susanna Hoffs – This Bird Has Flown.

Will Leitch – How Lucky, The Time Has Come.

Elizabeth McCracken – The Hero of This Book.

History

Elizabeth Hinton – America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.

David Grann – The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder.

Robert Kolker – Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

Josh Levin – The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth.

Memoir

Jason Kander – Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics & PTSD.

Kathryn Schulz – Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness.

Music

Jonathan Abrams – The Come–Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip–Hop.

Philosophy

Scott Hershovitz – Nasty, Brutish, & Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.

Lee McIntyre – On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy.

Justin E.H. Smith – The Internet is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning.

Politics

Dan Pfeiffer – Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the Maga Media Are Destroying America.

Psychology

Max Bazerman – Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop.

Sian Beilock – Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have to.

Angela Duckworth – Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Ellen Hendricksen – How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety.

Katy Milkman – How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

Richard Nisbett – Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

Michael Schur – How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.

Claude Steele – Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.

Ozan Varol – Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary.

Science

Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Peter Hotez – Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad.

Ed Yong – An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

Sports

Craig Calcaterra – Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game.

Russell Carleton – The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball.

Julie DiCaro – Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America.

Jessica Luther & Kavitha Davidson – Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan.

Jonathan Mayo – Smart, Wrong, & Lucky: The Origin Stories of Baseball’s Unexpected Stars.

Joe Posnanski – Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, The Baseball 100.

John Shea – 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid.

Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

Stick to baseball, 10/1/22.

Since my last weekend post, I’ve had three few posts up for subscribers to the Athletic, including my annual column on players I was wrong about, my annual Prospect of the Year column, and a quick scouting take on last weekend’s Future Stars Main Event showcase for the 2023 draft.

For Paste I reviewed the board game Cellulose, from Genius Games, which produces science-themed games that try to be both accurate and educational. It’s definitely the former, but I’m not sure about the latter, as it’s a good worker-placement game that you can play well without getting into a lot of the technical stuff.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was author and sportswriter Will Leitch, who wrote the wonderful 2021 novel How Lucky and who has a new novel coming out in May that you can pre-order here. We discussed his writing, his beloved Cardinals, and the upcoming slate of movies for this fall and winter. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter should return next week. COVID and some travel and other stuff just knocked me for a loop.

And now, the links…

An Immense World.

Ed Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Writing last year for his articles in the Atlantic (not my employer) about the COVID-19 pandemic, which I called way back in May of 2020, over a year before the award announcement. I was already a fan of his work after reading his tremendous first book, I Contain Multitudes, a thoughtful, detailed look at the importance of the microbiome, and how so many of our actions and policies work against our own health because of our fear of bacteria. (He also described the experiment to infect male Aeges aegypti mosquitos with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the eggs that result from their mating activity fail to hatch. It has since been used to reduce mosquito populations in areas where dengue fever is endemic.)

Yong’s latest book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, is a big departure from anything he’s written before, although he retains both his commitment to scientific accuracy and the sense of wonder that permeated his first book. This time around, he’s exploring an area I would guess most readers have never contemplated: How animals sense the world, often in ways that are beyond the reach of our senses, or even rely on senses that humans don’t have.

Yong begins with some discussion of the erroneous historical view, one that still persists today on a smaller scale, that non-human animals are less cognitively capable than we are, because we have evolved consciousness and they haven’t. It’s a view that fails on its face, as just about everyone who’s been around a dog knows that canines can hear sounds we can’t – hence the dog whistle, at least in its literal sense. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that there are examples across the animal world, and in some cases in other biological kingdoms as well, of senses more powerful than our five senses, and examples beyond those.

One of the best-known colloquial examples, although I would say probably not a well-understood one by laypeople, is echolocation in bats. Bats are nearly blind, but their powers of echolocation, using what we now call sonar to determine not just where objects are around them, but to find food and distinguish, say, something to eat from the leaf on which it’s sitting, involve a mental processing speed that is hard for us to comprehend. And it turns out humans are capable of echolocation as well, although evolution hasn’t advanced our skills in that area to the same extent because we haven’t needed it.

Yong also describes the handful of species that can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, a sense humans do not have at all, to find their way back to the beach where they were born, in the case of some turtles. There are animals and insects that can see parts of the infrared spectrum that we can’t, but there are also substantial portions of the animal kingdom that don’t see the world in the same colors we see – which is why waving a red cape in front of a bull is just a silly tradition, as bulls don’t have the red cones in their eyes to detect that color. Indeed, few animals see the world in the same colors that we do, which comes down to the fact that color isn’t something inherent in nature; it is how our eyes perceive vibrations of molecules in nature, because we have red, green, and blue cones in our retinas that send signals that our brains convert to color. (And some people, almost all women, have a fourth cone, making them “tetrachromats,” which Yong also discusses.) If you don’t have those cones, you see the world completely differently.

Yong ends with what is probably the most important part of An Immense World ­– an examination of how humans are screwing all of this up. You’re probably aware of how climate change and overdevelopment are already threatening habitats around the world. Light pollution threatens many species that rely on natural light sources to find food or shelter, or to migrate; noise pollution interferes with many species’ ability to communicate with each other, to find mates or identify predators. Humanity’s rapid rise in the last 200 years has been an unmitigated disaster for everything else on the planet, and Yong points to even more threats to biodiversity than those we already know about (e.g., those explained in The Sixth Extinction). There are also some examples of species adapting to these changes – birds that have learned to hang out near streetlights to eat the moths attracted to the illumination, for example – but they’re too few to make up for the losses. We have to be the ones to adapt, to live with less light, less noise, less everything, so that we don’t lose any more than we’ve already lost, especially not before we’ve learned more about it.

Also, Ed will be my guest this week on the Keith Law Show. The episode should be up on Tuesday, 9/20.

Next up: Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.

Top 50 novels of the century (so far).

I’ve been planning to do some sort of ranking of the best novels of this century for at least four years now, but for a variety of reasons never sat down to actually do it. I think one reason is the constant sense that I haven’t read enough books to make such a list, although that’s probably silly given how much I read, and since nobody, not even full-time book critics (is there such a job any more?), can read absolutely everything. I can’t read every book, play every game, hear every album, or watch every movie before sitting down to decide which ones are my favorites.

The Twitter replies to my comment about The Netanyahus being the worst Pulitzer winner in at least 25 years finally got me back to the spreadsheet I’d started in 2018, although I ended up trashing it and starting over, to prepare for this post. I originally had about 67 books on the list, cut a few, ranked 50, and put ten honorable mentions at the end. Then I started writing the blurbs and moved a few books around the rankings too, which is, coincidentally, how I do player rankings for work as well. Sometimes you put down some words and realize you liked something more or less than you thought you did. It’s good to be flexible.

I’ve written the rankings in reverse order, so we’ll start at 50, with honorable mentions at the end. The hyperlink on each title goes to Bookshop.org, for which I have an affiliate account (so I get a small commission for each book sold through those links). They give 10% of earnings to local bookstores, and allow stores to sell via their site and keep all of the profits. If you can’t buy a book from your local independent bookstore, this is the next best option.

So, here we go – as of June 20, 2022, here are my top 50 books of this century:

50. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Full review. A novelization of an old folk tale, The Snow Child tells the story of a couple who move to Alaska after their infant dies, where a girl, Faina, appears to have come to life from the snowchild they made. Is she real? A fairy? A hallucination? Ivey’s tale of grief, loss, and hope is haunting while balancing the possibilities of life against its inevitable tragedies.

49. The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman. Full review. A madcap romp of sex, devil-worship, and, yes, teleportation, this book runs through multiple genres, both paying homage to them while sending them up, along with slapstick and other lowbrow humor, such as the side character who can’t tell a person from a painting of that person and keeps talking to the portraits of his ancestors as if they’re real.

48. All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu. Full review. A love story wrapped in a tale of identity, as we meet two men in an African country on the brink of civil war, with one later fleeing to America, where he falls in love with Helen, a social worker assigned to help him assimilate. Names and dates are left ambiguous or omitted entirely, while the importance of remembering as well as deliberate forgetting hover over both narratives.

47. Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Full review. What begins as a straightforward narrative about a high school play and a team-building exercise turns into metafictional, time-shifting story that asks questions about, to borrow a phrase, who lives, who dies, and who tells your story – and specifically who has the right to tell your story.

46. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. Full review. A novel in two distinct halves, the first about the husband, the second about the wife, where the second half reveals unseen truths about the first. It’s ambitious yet feels deeply personal, and the surfeit of literary references actually works in favor of the narrative, rather than coming off as showy.

45. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Full review. The use of the first-person plural is gimmicky, but there’s a reason for the conceit in this novel that looks at the decline of the American workplace more than ten years before COVID-19 (may have) killed it off for good. There’s a related but distinct short story in the middle of the novel that breaks things up in a suboptimal way, but the two parts that form the shell are compelling and prescient.

44. The Oracle Year, by Charles Soule. Full review. The debut novel from comic book author Soule, this work speculative fiction gives us bassist Will Dando, who wakes up one day with 108 highly specific predictions in his head … and they start to come true. It’s imperfect in some ways but incredibly well-told, witty, and intense.

43. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Full review. I do not agree with the critical and, I think, popular consensus that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Chabon’s best work; that book is incredibly imaginative and rich with story, but it’s bloated and loses its focus, while this novel, a neo-noir detective story set in an alternate universe where the world’s Jews have been given a homeland in southeastern Alaska, hits similar themes with precision while hewing closely to its target style.

42. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. If you’re going to go sixteen years between novels, the return ought to be something special. Piranesi is far shorter than her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but has the same prose, imagery, and sense of wonder as the earlier work. It’s a mystery in a fantasy novel, as the narrator and the reader try to understand exactly where the narrator is, and how he got there. It’s like reading a dream.

41. HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Full review. Winner of France’s Prix Goncourt Prize, this historical novel has a metafictional element, combining a fictionalized telling of the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a story about the difficulty of telling that very story. It’s bold and ambitious, not entirely successful, but highly compelling, and of course there’s some satisfaction in reading about the successful assassination of one of the principal architects of the murders of 8 million Jews, Roma, gays, and other minority peoples.

40. From a Low and Quiet Sea, by Donal Ryan. Full review. A scant novel that tells the stories of three men, with no apparent connection, struggling with grief and sadness, until another catastrophe brings them together in the brief, final section. The novel took some criticism for its portrayal of Farouk, a Syrian refugee, in too-generic terms, but Ryan’s tremendous empathy for his characters ruled the day for me.

39. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Full review. A daring structure that follows ten generations of a family through two separate lines takes the reader from west Africa and the enslavement of its people to modern-day American and back to Ghana where the story began. Gyasi’s debut novel manages to develop and humanize its many characters in just a few pages each, allowing the story to build and grow even with this tenuous framework.

38. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. Full review. I thought this deserved the Pulitzer in 2021 rather than Louise Erdich’s fine but not award-worthy The Night Watchman. Inspired by Nella Larson’s novella Passing, which was the basis for the superb film directed by Rebecca Hall, this novel covers a pair of sisters, one of whom chooses to pass for white while the other does not, while exploring critical themes of race and identity in our modern society.

37. All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Full review. Such a clever concept for a novel – All the Birds gives us two related, intertwined narratives, one from modern fantasy and one from hard science fiction, bringing them together, pulling them apart, and allowing the two main characters to show their flaws as they develop while heading towards a surprising resolution in a world not too far off from our own late-stage capitalist dystopia.

36. Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Full review. Halliday takes her romantic relationship with Philip Roth, who was over forty years her senior, and fictionalizes it in this wonderful, multi-part novel that revels in the asymmetry of that affair while giving Halliday’s stand-in, Alice, an unusual agency for the situation. That portion of the novel is followed by an absurdist section on a man with dual Iraqi-US citizenship who gets caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic trap at a London airport, a story with no apparent connection to the first one until the coda brings them together.

35. Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis. Full review. Published as two novels but sharing a continuous narrative, this time-travel story, sending historians from future Oxford back to World War II, where they get stuck (as often happens in Willis’s time-travel stories) and involved in the action in ways they shouldn’t, is grand, emotional, and evocative of the great British literature of the era it depicts.

34. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Diminishing returns set in quickly with its sequels, but Gilead, which was Robinson’s first novel in over twenty years when it was published, is a marvel of simplicity. It’s an epistolary novel, written as letters from its protagonist, a dying clergyman named John Ames, to his seven-year-old son for the child to read when he’s older. It’s a meditation on forgiveness and our limited capacity to understand the plights of others.

33. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter. Full review. I’m stretching the qualifications here, as this novella – it’s too short to properly call it a novel – is a marvel of wordplay and empathy, poetry in motion on the pages of a book. The Crow visits a father of two whose wife has died suddenly, and who is paralyzed by grief just as his sons need him most. Porter does not shy away from the man’s grief, but the Crow is there for a purpose, and the way Porter plays with language to advance the story is utterly extraordinary.

32. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. My favorite book of 2021, Lockwood’s novel is extremely online – or at least her main character is, and it’s not going well, so when something bad happens IRL, she’s not ready to handle it. The novel varies in style from stream-of-consciousness to poetry to standard prose, jumping around in perspective and playing with language in ways that earned the book comparisons to the experimental novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.

31. The White Tiger, by Aravind Ariga. Full review. A dark comedy and satire of the upwardly mobile culture of contemporary Indian cities, The White Tiger gives us one of the great anti-heroes of the century in Balram, who rises from poverty through his own determination and a convenient lack of scruples to prosperity – but not without leaving some bodies behind him, figuratively and eventually literally.

30. The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. Full review. The first American-authored novel to win the Booker Prize, The Sellout is a vicious satire that’s also completely bonkers. The narrator, a Black man who lives in an “agrarian ghetto” in Los Angeles County, stands trial for trying to bring back slavery – the conclusion of a series of ill-conceived attempts to resegregate the area so that his unincorporated town, Dickens, will return to the map.

29. An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon. Full review. Set on a massive spaceship with its own highly structured, race-based caste society, this dystopian novel upends conventions of the child-hero genre while exploring racial power dynamics as well as how elites maintain their grip on society through fear and myth.

28. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Full review. From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes a light sci-fi novel where refugees can flee through special portals that appear as actual doors and allow passage through to other places on the globe. The story follows a couple fleeing war in an unnamed country in southeast or south Asia through a series of those doors, allowing them to experience the poor treatment and mistrust refugees face across the world, a journey that also tests their feelings for each other.

27. Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken. Full review. McCracken is Ann Patchett’s primary editor, and there’s some similarity in their fiction as both authors show deep empathy and understanding for their characters. Set in a small town outside Boston, Bowlaway follows a cast of characters through multiple generations, starting with the strange woman who appeared in the town’s graveyard with no memory of where she’d been, after which she founds a candlepin bowling alley and hires a couple of the town’s (many) eccentrics.

26. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full (but short) review. Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle­ remains my favorite of his works, with this follow-up novel second for me thanks to similar themes and literary techniques – notably his extensive use of magical realism in a context beyond that seen in the Latin American or African traditions of magical realism.He doesn’t write women well at all, though, a failing that has become more apparent in his novels since this one.

25. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Full review. I’ll quote my own review: “If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.” An epic work of fiction set among the pachinko parlors of Japan, the novel explores themes of alienation and isolation by looking at Koreans living and working in a foreign country that has always viewed them as an inferior minority.

24. The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Full review. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for each of the books in her Broken Earth trilogy, but this book, her first after that series ended, is her best so far. Six people find themselves transformed so that each of them is a borough of New York City or the city entire – not metaphorically, but physically, in a sort of transubstantiation, and their personalities match the character of the geographies they have become.

23. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon. Full review. I have read several Pynchon novels, but none made me laugh like this one did – it’s a sort of slacker noir, a detective novel set in drug-addled California in the 1970s, with a detective who’s seldom sober enough for the job. It is far, far more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, and doesn’t require esoteric knowledge to understand it like The Crying of Lot 49.

22. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Full review. As ambitious a work of fiction as any I’ve read this century, Cloud Atlas contains six nested novellas, five of them split into two parts (so that the novella that starts the book also finishes it), with one element tying each one to the next. Each novella has a unique style – I’m partial to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a detective story – and Mitchell moves so deftly from one to the next that the whole work remains cohesive.

21. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Full review. Price has written for The Wire and The Night Of, as well as authoring nine novels, including 1992’s Clockers and this one, a broad, gritty piece of highly realistic fiction that follows a broad ensemble of characters through the ramifications of what appears to be an ordinary (if awful) street crime.

20. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Full review. Another novel with a complex structure, this epic work follows a prospector who arrives in a New Zealand mining town, only to walk into a set of mysteries including a dead hermit, a prostitute who may have attempted suicide, stolen claims, and much more. The structure itself relates to the twelve signs of the zodiac and to the planets in the solar system, although I don’t think you need to see or follow that to appreciate its incredible story and rich characterization.

19. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. Full review. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s guidelines say it is for a work “by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Johnson is American, but this remarkable novel definitely does not deal with American life – it is about North Korea, and opens a window on to that most isolated nation, following a young boy in a North Korean orphanage through his military service, time in a prison mine, and then a fantastical life after prison that puts him in the crosshairs of the Dear Leader himself.

18. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. Full review. A novel that finds hope in hopelessness, giving us Leo Gorsky, perhaps the most ill-fated man in the universe, a Holocaust survivor whose lover thought he was dead and married someone else while carrying Leo’s baby. His story intertwines with two others around a book within the book, also called The History of Love, leading to a deeply emotional, unlikely-but-not-impossible conclusion.

17. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Full review. One of the most acclaimed books of the last twenty years (I think), this book reimagines the network of people, including Quakers, free Blacks, and other abolitionists who helped slaves escape the antebellum South as an actual subterranean railroad that served the same purpose – but that exposes the fleeing slaves of the book to the horrors of multiple Confederate states before they get close to freedom.

16. Wizard of the Crow, by Ng?g? wa Thiong’o. wa Thing’o is a revered Kenyan author, playwright, and Fanonist dissident who was imprisoned in the 1970s for writing a play that criticized the government. He’s written only two novels in the last 30 years, but one of them, 2004’s Wizard of the Crow, is an epic work of magical realism, satire, and scathing political commentary. Set in a corrupt African dictatorship, where allegiances change with the wind, a new power emerges in the form of an inadvertent charlatan calling himself the Wizard of the Crow, who threatens the country’s Ruler in the days after the end of colonialism.

15. Among Others, by Jo Walton. Full review. I first read this book because it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for its year, but that may undersell it, because it’s far from just a genre book – this is a beautiful if somewhat dark coming-of-age novel with just a hint of fantasy in the setting. Calling it a fantasy novel might deter some people from reading it; this isn’t swords and sorcery, or knights and damsels, just a damn good story about growing up when one of the people who should love and protect you turns out to be an evil witch.

14. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie. Full review. Adichie has received more attention for her novel Americanah and her non-fiction writing, including We Should All Be Feminists (which, yes, we should), but this is her best work to date – a novel set during the Nigerian Civil War, when the Nigerian government blockaded the secessionist state of Biafra, causing a famine that killed two million people. I don’t see any particular parallels to anything happening today, though. Adichie follows five characters, including two couples, from before the war began through the depths of the conflict, through personal losses and the collapse of what had been a reasonably prosperous society.

13. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. Russo is one of the funniest writers I’ve read, but in this, his best novel, he also works in wry commentary on how economic declines hit blue-collar American towns (this one in New England, like most of his settings) and affect the people in them at a deeply personal level. His characters are well-built and contribute to the sense of a specific place – you may not live in this town, but you understand it, and picture it, and have your favorites among the people in it. And when the big plot point finally comes in this book, one that could easily happen in a novel set today, you’re affected because the characters you care about are affected.

12. All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. Full review. One of the best-plotted novels I’ve ever read, All The Light runs about 500 pages, yet I read it in two days on a work trip because I absolutely could not wait to see how the novel’s twin storylines would come together – and they do, in almost miraculous fashion, as two children, a blind French girl and a true-believer German boy, navigate the closing windows of Europe on the brink of war.

11. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fannone Jeffers. Full review. I’m trying to avoid recency bias here, but this is the best book I’ve read in a few years – if we’re just going off this list, I think it’s the best I’ve read in about five years. Jeffers’ debut novel covers centuries of history through the lens of one Black family, from their ancestors in slavery to the contemporary struggles of three sisters, focused on one named Ailey Pearl, to cope with the weight of their racial history and a very personal trauma that has affected all of them. The prose is beautiful and the characters are rich and compelling, even many of the secondary ones.

10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Full review. Gaiman takes forgotten gods from religions around the world and brings them back to modern-day America in a complex fight for the soul of the country. For some reason, this centers on Shadow, a man just out of prison, who runs into Odin incarnate on the flight home. The book also spawned a related work, Anansi Boys, which is also excellent but not as ambitious as this tour de force, which seems to twist the fantasy genre inside-out along with a wildly exciting, action-packed story.

9. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Full review. Inspired by the takeover of the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Bel Canto paints a rich portrait of a huge ensemble of characters, both hostages and terrorists, who become a village of sorts, learning about each other as we do, facing their fears and weaknesses, falling in love, becoming oblivious to the outside world. Patchett is always a beautiful writer who creates complex characters and shows empathy for even the worst of them, and her skills were most on display here, a novel she has indicated was inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

8. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John. Full review. How is one of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read set during a global pandemic that wipes out a huge portion of the planet’s population and leads to the complete collapse of civilized society? Perhaps because St. John focuses so much on the humanity within the crisis, and sees the good and the bad that come about when people are pushed beyond their limits. There’s also a small plot strand that doubles as an ode to the enduring power of great stories to entertain and enrich us.

7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro wrote two of the best novels I’ve ever read – this one and Remains of the Day, written in 1989. Never Let Me Go starts out like a work of classic British literature, perhaps a coming-of-age drama in the vein of Brideshead Revisited, but then the novel’s big secret is revealed and it turns into a Greek tragedy that confronts impossible questions of identity, ethics, and sacrifice.

6. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. Full review. I read this and The Orphan Master’s Son back-to-back in the summer of 2013, finishing this slim novel in just two days; it was such a great week of reading that I still remember it clearly, with two books that were so great, so compelling, that I was just lost in them. The Sense of an Ending gives us Tony Webster, now retired, divorced, living alone, first remembering a period from his school days with his girlfriend Veronica and his precocious friend Adrian. When Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony a bit of money, he reconnects with Veronica, and the edifice in his memory starts to crumble as he learns things he never knew about his own past.

5. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman. Full review. Rahman’s lone novel to date is a knockout, combining the U.S.’s failed war in Afghanistan and the 2007-08 financial crisis in a story that ranges from delving into the roots of one man’s personal crises to blistering attacks on the power of global elites. It’s postcolonial literature through an entirely different, diasporic lens, and the story moves at a brisk pace despite a lack of traditional action. When the ending hits, it is a metaphorical bomb on the page, and throws everything that has come before into question.

4. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Full review. Saunders is a master of the short story, winning awards for his collection Tenth of December, but didn’t publish his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, until he was 59, and all that book did was win the Booker Prize. Set mostly over the course of a single night in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist concept of a state between life and rebirth, and follows Abraham Lincoln through his grief over the death of his son Willie, who died at age 11 of typhoid fever, just a year into his father’s first term as President, while working in snippets from real and fictional news stories of the time. It’s a profound look at parenthood and the unendurable loss of a child, from one of our greatest contemporary prose writers.

3. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Harrowing, dark, and unforgettable in so many ways, The Road is the most powerful book I have ever read on what it is like to be a parent and be willing to give up everything, including yourself, for your child. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where society is gone and humanity may be headed for extinction, The Road follows the Man and the Boy as they walk down abandoned interstates towards the sea and an unknown, possibly nonexistent, hope. It is graphic and horrifying, often difficult to read for its content, but it is the exemplar of how fiction can illuminate core truths about life.

2. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Full review. Out of the 1200+ novels I’ve read in my life, this is the one about which I have most changed by opinion from my initial reading. I was so unused to Smith’s incredible storytelling style, dubbed “hysterical realism” by critic James Wood in his review, that my first response was rather negative – but that’s because I was used to very specific styles of literature. The more I thought about the book after finishing, over days and months, the more I realized the incredible genius of it. So much literature of this century owes a debt to Smith and White Teeth and Hortense’s many root canals. It will defy your expectations for a novel in all of the best ways and its themes are both very much of its moment and utterly timeless.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. A fantasy novel, yes, but so much more, and the fastest 1000-page novel I’ve ever read. (The Executioner’s Song was close, but it’s also not really a novel.) The two characters of the title are magicians in 19th century London, the latter an older, curmudgeonly man who proves that magic still exists centuries after its decline in England, and the former a younger upstart who becomes Norrell’s pupil. The two clash over magic’s use and end up engaged in a public battle of philosophies, while Norrell’s bargain with an underworld fairy known as “the gentleman with the thistle-down hair” has brought curses upon many within London, including Strange’s wife, Arabella. It is a work of stupendous imagination, written very much in the style of literature of that period, but with the very modern touch of fabricated footnotes that contain much of the book’s great wit. The book was also adapted into a seven-part BBC series that contained one of my favorite TV lines ever, and that hewed closely to the story and characters from the original text. Clarke has created a world like ours and yet so very unlike it, with two of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered, and uses fantasy as her vehicle but not her raison d’être (d’écrire?): Magic just lets her tell this majestic story of two men and their egos, fighting each other over philosophy while the world around them burns. It is gripping right until the end, and will leave you wanting more.

Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

Eating to Extinction.

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them makes its important point – that declining biodiversity will impact our food supply in multiple ways – in unusual fashion: Rather than arguing the point in a straight narrative, Saladino gives the reader a tour of many of the rare foods at risk of extinction from environmental degradation, globalization, even over-regulation in some cases, presenting the scientific case for preserving them but relying more on emotional appeals. We’ll miss these foods if they’re gone, or maybe we’ll want to try them more for knowing they exist and might disappear.

The strongest arguments here come in the various sections on plants, because of the evolutionary case Saladino offers. Take the banana, probably the best-known sustainability problem in our food supply: Most of the bananas sold in the world are Cavendish bananas, every plant of which is genetically identical, because the plants themselves are sterile and must be propagated via clones. This deprives the plants of the opportunity to develop new defenses to pathogens or environmental changes via evolution; mutations are discouraged in monoculture farming. The Cavendish itself is now defenseless against a real threat to its existence: Panama disease, which previously wiped out Gros Michel banana plantations, has mutated and is in the process of wiping out Cavendish plantations as well. The banana you know and love is, to put it bluntly, fucked.

Saladino offers examples from the other side of the evolutionary equation, identifying rare fruits, vegetables, and other plants like wild coffee that offer both the genetic diversity these plants will need to survive – forever, even after our species is gone – and more immediate benefits to us, such as unique flavors or cultural legacies. Coffee is struggling in the face of climate change that is driving it to higher altitudes and pests like the fungus that causes coffee-leaf rust; the wild coffees of Ethiopia may provide genetic solutions, at least until the next crisis comes along. There’s a wild maize plant in Mexico that fixes its own nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium, a crop that could help address the world’s growing need for food. The wheat we’ve selected for easy harvesting and processing is close to a monoculture, and it wouldn’t take much to collapse the annual crop, even though there are hundreds of thousands of known varieties of wild wheat, like the wild emmer wheat of eastern Turkey known as kavilca.

He explores the impact that even so-called ‘sustainable’ solutions often have on wild populations, and how what works for our food supply in the short term leaves it even more vulnerable in the long term. We’ve nearly wiped out wild Atlantic salmon and are well on our way to doing the same in the Pacific, while farmed salmon fill our stores and plates, but when those farmed salmon get loose from their aquaculture pens, they interbreed with wild populations and can reduce genetic diversity, leaving those fish more vulnerable to diseases.

Some of these endangered foods are more closely tied to culture than to global food needs or biodiversity, such as the honey gathered by the native Hadza people in Tanzania, where local bee and bird populations are threatened both by habitat destruction and the loss of symbiotic relationships they’ve developed with humans. Certain birds would identify hives in baobab trees that contained honey, and humans would hear their calls and bring down the nests. The humans would eat the honey and parts of the honeycomb, while the birds would wait nearby to consume what the humans did not. This entire way of life is disappearing as native populations lose their land and become assimilated into urban life and dependent on processed foods.

Along the way, Saladino explains (several times) the presence of various seed banks around the world, including the critical one on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, and the two great success stories of the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen in artificial fertilizer and the Green Revolution – the post-WWII adoption of high-yielding varieties of cereal and grain crops, notably dwarf wheat and rice, along with scientific methods of increasing yields through those artificial fertilizers and massive monocultures. (Not mentioned is how Haber’s research, which has helped accelerate climate change, also led to the development of Zyklon-B.) There’s quite a bit of science in here, which does help move things along in what amounts to a series of mini-essays on dozens of foods.

Saladino’s reference-work approach isn’t entirely successful for that last reason; sometimes, it’s like reading an encyclopedia. It’s often an interesting one, and Saladino went to all of these places to try the endangered foods and eat them with the locals who grow or gather or develop them. But such a broad look at the subject guarantees that some essays will be duds, and by the time we get to the end, Saladino’s epilogue, “think like a Hadza,” is so far removed from the opening essay on those people and their honey-gathering that the throughline connecting all of these foods has started to fray a bit. It works best as a call to action – we need to find and value these products, to keep them alive and protect those habitats or those cultures, and to stop relying on these monocultures to feed ourselves. You can find other wheat flours even at Whole Foods and similar stores, while there might even be local mills or growers near you offering unconventional (and thus genetically distinct) flours and grains and beans. Our diets will be richer for it, and we’ll be taking a small step towards protecting the future of humanity before we scorch the planet growing the same five crops.

Next up: I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

The Nickel Boys.

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the true story of a violent ‘reform school’ in the South to tell yet another dazzling, compelling story about race and the experience of people of color in the United States, and how white elites have continued to suppress the black populations in the South long after the Civil War was over.

The Nickel Boys takes place largely in the panhandle of Florida, near Tallahassee, at a fictional reform school for juveniles called the Nickel Academy, where white and black boys are separated into different houses, and the treatment is brutal and dehumanizing. It’s based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which operated for over 100 years and at one point was the largest institution of its type in the country. The school closed in 2011 after a massive state investigation into charges of abuse, and a year later Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South Florida, used ground-penetrating radar to find mass graves of on the site. They’ve found an estimated 80 corpses already, with exhumations ongoing. (The State of Florida officially apologized to the surviving boys in 2017, and as of September of 2019, after two-plus years of delays, work finally began on building memorials to the boys who died at Dozier and its satellite campus.)

Whitehead draws on survivors’ accounts to create the Nickel Academy, building his narrative around a boy named Elwood, arrested for being a passenger in a car that may have been stolen, ruining his hopes of bettering himself by continuing his education. Elwood has a strong moral compass, one that sometimes works against him because he speaks up when the world thinks he shouldn’t. Once imprisoned at Nickel, he meets Turner, another young African-American inmate who matches Elwood’s idealistic view of the world with an equally powerful cynicism, and a sense of self-preservation that he tries to impart to Elwood to keep the latter boy from meeting the fate of others who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night.

Life at Nickel is about what you’d expect for black boys at a reform school run by whites in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re barely fed, because the administrators skim off the food sent for the black kids (less so when it’s for the white boys across the property) and sell it to local restaurants; they do the same with other supplies, like those for the boys’ education. They’re beaten in a building called the White House – the same as the name of the actual building that still stands on the Dozier property where illicit beatings took place – and many are sexually assaulted by guards. Boys who try to escape or otherwise draw the ire of the administration are taken from their beds in the middle of the night and tortured to death, after which their families – if they have any – are told that the boys ran away. There’s a nominal system for earning your way to release if you follow the rules and don’t push back, although in Whitehead’s depiction it’s hard to see many boys running this gauntlet successfully, given the venality of the administrators and bloodthirst of the guards.

The narrative itself revolves around Elwood and Turner, and Elwood’s own hopes that he’ll earn his way out – although the guards take him to the White House once – and tell the world about what’s going on at Nickel. Whitehead could have made this story even more brutal than it was, but instead he gives the reader just enough to depict the inhumanity of the school without dwelling on lurid details. This is a story of two boys, of two different ways of facing their incarceration and subjugation, and of a society that didn’t care at all about a few more dead black boys. Nothing Whitehead can write here is as damning to Florida, and to the American South, as what actually happened at Dozier and how long it has taken the state to even acknowledge the crimes committed against children of color at the school, but the way he depicts these two boys, especially the depth of Elwood’s character and the tragedy of his backstory, make The Nickel Boys an immersive and compelling read even though you know that any page could bring a scene of unbearable violence. I have no means or justification for predicting the Pulitzer winners, but if Whitehead wins for the second time in four years I won’t be the least bit surprised.

Next up: Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth.

Stick to baseball, 5/20/18.

I was busy this week, including posting another first-round mock for next month’s MLB draft (Insider).

For Vulture, I ranked the 25 best board game apps for mobile devices, considering anything available for iOS or Android. Steam-only titles were not eligible.

For Paste, I reviewed the light deduction/puzzle game Automata Noir, a fun filler title that lets you do a little more than most deduction games where you’re just trying to guess who’s the bad guy.

PennLive asked fifty Pennsylvania librarians for their summer beach read recommendations and one kind soul recommended my own Smart Baseball, now available in paperback.

I’ll be appearing at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose on July 14th along with Jay Jaffe to talk baseball & sign our respective books (or I can sign Jay’s and he can sign mine, whatever you fancy).

And now, the links:

Stick to baseball, 5/20/17.

My one baseball post this past week was the annual ranking of the Top 25 MLB players under 25, which causes more “read the intro” violations than anything else I write every year. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday while in Minneapolis; I will do a quick eats post from there soon, but I’m about six topics behind here due to travel and lack of sleep.

For Paste, I reviewed the new puzzle game Shahrazad, which has a solo version and a two-player mode, both pretty clever with fantastic artwork and very few rules to learn.

My book, Smart Baseball, came out on April 25th from HarperCollins in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. I traveled to Atlanta and the Twin Cities for readings/signings this past week, and am very grateful to all of you who came out to buy the book, have yours signed, or just say hello; we had 50+ folks at each event and Moon Palace Books sold out of the book Thursday night. Smart Baseball also got a very positive review from an unexpected source, the political site The Federalist.

I’m still sending out my email newsletter when I can, and the last edition, about some recent troubles I’ve had with my anxiety disorder and the medication I take for it, got the strongest response yet – so many replies and comments, in fact, that I haven’t been able to respond to the majority of them. I did see them all, though, and I really appreciate all the kind words.

And now, the links…