Another year in the books. This year's year in review post is a little lower effort. I was procrastinating on it but also very busy with other stuff, so I just figured I had to get it out. I read a lot of great books this year and even created a little library of them arranged by Dewey Decimal, a system that is not that intuitive sometimes. I ended up very interested in nationalism by the end of the year, and I tried to read some classics. I did Kissinger's Diplomacy, Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Anderson's Imagined Communities, and started Said's The Question of Palestine. Not much fiction, but I also got some classics in I, Claudius, and Tevye the Dairyman. Got a lot of books done but a lower book and page count than last year, which was intentional. This was a good amount of reading for the year I would say, and probably even a little higher than normal.
Books and pages (according to Goodreads) read per month:
January: 4 books, 1,532 pages
February: 3 books 920 pages
March: 2 books, 638 pages
April: 4 books, 1,544 pages
May: 3 books, 980 pages
June: 2 books, 1,082 pages,
July: 4 books, 1,450 pages
August: 5 books, 1,560 pages
September: 3 books, 1,329 pages
October: 4 books, 1,907 pages
November: 2 books, 894 pages
December: 6 books, 1,793 pages
Best Books of The Year
Fifth: The Dawn of Everything. This book just made me think. It comes from a totally different perspective than I am used to and covers parts of human history and pre-history that feel like different worlds.
Fourth: Imagined Communities. This was one of several books I read about nationalism this year. It is obviously a classic and probably worth a re-read at some point. It was really interesting since it lead me on the path to Nations and Nationalism later in the year. Imagined Communities described the rise of nationalism in heavily linguistic terms, whereas Hobsbawm was more focused on the state.
Third: Amusing Ourselves to Death. I crushed this book, I think since media studies was such a foreign genre to me. Postman is a luddite in a really appealing way, and a true lover of intellectualism. And this is a book that feels more relevant of course now than when it was written.
Second: Capitalism, Alone. Milanovic's framework for understanding the world is extremely compelling. It reads like an epic in its scope, and Milanovic cuts to the core of what the world's biggest issues are and the costs of resolving them.
First: The True Believer. I got more interested in books written by the generation that lived through the democratic recession of the 1920s-1940s, and this book delivered way more than I expected. In very few pages, Eric Hoffer packed a huge punch of deep analysis on what makes a person join a mass movement. Best book of the year and one of the best I've ever read.
Honorable Mentions
- Nations and Nationalism
- On Diplomacy
- Talleyrand
- Who Owns Antiquity?
- The Great Partition
- To Start a War
My Best-Written Reflections of the Year
For whatever reason, I think the reflections I did on the books below were especially good. Mostly just because I was thorough and was really feeling the reflection. They're linked below.
Death and Life of the Great Lakes
2023: 15,629 pages over 42 books, averaging about 372 pages per book.
2022: 22,902 pages over 50 books, averaging about 458 pages per book.
2021: 14,144 pages over 27 books, averaging about 524 pages per book.
2020: 13,415 pages over 32 books, averaging about 419 pages per book.
2019: 55,502 pages over 116 books, averaging about 478 pages per book.
2018: 18,122 pages over 33 books, averaging about 549 pages per book.
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