1000 Books, Year 4

Happy November 14 everyone! What’s everyone doing to celebrate the big day?

For those who don’t know, November 14 is the yearly anniversary of me starting my reading challenge that I began a few years ago:

[To] read a thousand books in my lifetime. I decided to start counting books I’d read since November 14, 2014 (although I’d read many books before this, I really only wanted to start counting then, so I could better catalogue them).

This year was quite a wild ride for me in far more ways than I can or will describe in this blog post, but as a summary I:

• read 32 books!
• crossed the 10% mark! (Star Wars: Aftermath was the hundredth book, lol)
• basically discovered fiction for the first time in my life.
• read too many books in airports.
• cried multiple times while reading (and not reading) on the subway.

Anyway, here are the books Jason loved, hated, and overall read in Year 4 of his reading quest!

• Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert.

This was the first book I read when I began my reading challenge in 2014 and this year seemed like a great time to revisit it. Since I’m a different person every time I read a book, it was a neat experience reflecting on how I’d changed since I’d last read it.

Mindstorms remains a remarkable book which you should (re-)read if you haven’t. Don’t get distracted by how Papert talks about computers; get distracted by how Papert talks about children, learning, and powerful ideas. In our shallow, callous pop culture, it’s nice to be reminded of deep, earth shaking ideas and an unfaltering belief in the potential of children.

• Seconds, by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Oh my god was it less than a year ago that I read this??

• Speaking Out Louder, by Jack Layton.

Layton is probably Canada’s best Prime Minister who never got to be Prime Minister. This book, written before his untimely death, discusses big ideas for Canada and Canadians. Practical, rational, and hopeful.

• Visual Intelligence, by David Hoffman.

Jesus I read this in January of this year?

• Dear Data, by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec.

Good god it can’t be.

• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, by Frans de Waal.

How long was this fucking year?

• At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman.

This book promised some pretty profound things about the underlying systems of the universe, but in my opinion spent a little too long admiring itself in the mirror rather than delivering on its ideas.

• Slapstick, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Uproarious! Again I say, everyone should read more KV.

• Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green.

Um. I refuse to believe I read this book in February. Nope. It was definitely ten years ago when I read this book.

• Hunger Games: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins.

Alright real talk: the I really enjoy the Hunger Games books. I love the narrative style, I love all the emotions Katniss goes through, I love the themes it explores, like how the rich profit off the broken backs of the poor, how opulence depends on suffering, how savage entertainment can be.

But 2018 was not the time for me to have read this book.

This book accompanied me to the US border where I was denied entry and separated from my family. This book accompanied me while I watched the US government tear children away from their parents and lock them in cages.

2018 was a year of physical, emotional, and psychological violence. And this book was a little too much for me.

• The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, by Stephen King.

Don’t even.

• Cognition in the Wild, by Edwin Hutchins.

Hope you like boats!!

• The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan.

God bless the greatest invention of all time: writing, such that we may still be haunted by Carl Sagan’s words decades after he left us.

This book argues for science as the most tested and true antidote to superstition and human….all around dumbness.

• Star Wars: Aftermath, by Chuck Wendig.

💯

• Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton.

What I wanted: everything I liked about the movie but diving deeper into the nerdier sciency stuff.

What I got: Everything I wanted.

• The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King.

Hi I’m a white Canadian who knows relatively nothing about the past + present of my country’s indigenous peoples. King’s book provided an excellent starting point for an area of my country and culture I still know shamefully too little about.

• Snot Girl Vol 1 & 2, by Leslie Hung & Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Beautiful and brilliant and juicy and hilarious.

• Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer.

Last year I read (but didn’t love) VanderMeer’s Annihilation and was reluctant to read more of his books, but the cover to Borne intrigued me (some sort of sentient plant-baby that grows and learns?? hell yes). It was kind of a blast to read even if my original guess as to what it was about was way off.

It’s hard not to love the plant-baby tho.

• Ramshackle, by Alison McCreesh.

Ugh really was this really 2018?

• Star Wars: Aftermath 2, by Chuck Wendig.

Having never really read Star Wars books until this summer, I had fun with these two. But it’s made me realize: the universe of Star Wars only really makes sense in movies and doesn’t really translate super well to books.

I think books demand a little more coherence than do movies. In a movie, it’s more or less acceptable to have a “big bad evil government that does bad” and you can suspend disbelief without too much trouble. But in a book? Well, there’s gotta be backstory, there’s gotta be motivation, there’s gotta be more thought to what’s going on. And suddenly, Star Wars kinda falls apart a bit.

But hey, it was still a fun read and couldn’t we all use some more fun reads in our lives?

• I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Yong.

You contain anecdotes.

• Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis.

Loved this book! Felt like a spiritual successor to Understanding Comics and again reminds me how much unfulfilled potential the comic format has as a tool for explanation.

• A Man Without a Country, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Re-read this bad boy on an airplane and christ it’s like jet fuel for your rational brain.

• Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle.

Sherry gets me.

• Scale, by Geoffrey West.

This was a good book that needed to be scaled to ¾ its actual size.

• Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer.

Way better than Annihilation.

• Creative Selection, by Ken Kocienda.

• Reincarnation Blues, by Michael Poore.

My favourite book of the year, easily. It tells the story of Milo, a man who is given 10000 lives in which to attain “perfection.” It details in many heartwarming, sometimes sad, and always hilarious ways, he lives and dies.

A line in the book made me cry on the subway, so much I had to put the book away.

Then I re-read the line a few minutes later and damnit I cried all over again.

This book made me think about life and death in ways I hadn’t before. Some new things clicked for me. It made me think about time in new ways too. I can’t tell if I’m living my first or my last life, but I’m definitely living one hell of one.

Do you ever get that giddy feeling when you meet someone new who you just really click with? And you think, wow, this person is just fascinating! All you want to do is just hear more.

And then, oh fuck, they go and say something really awful and you cringe, and you think “No! I wanted you to have not said that, I wanted you to be better than that!” Do you know this feeling?

There were moments in this book when I felt like that. I loved this book, mostly, but there’s a chapter where, for no real reason! there’s the trope where a female character makes a false rape accusation against our male protagonist. And then he goes to jail and he suffers in all kinds of terrible ways. And frankly that’s just garbage. It’s a bad trope and it needs to die and I was so upset to read that in this book. I felt hurt by it, I felt like the book betrayed me.

Anyway, read the book, or don’t. I’d understand either way. But suffice it to say, it was a wild ride for me.

• Here, by Richard McGuire.

Here’s another non-linear story about time, this one told by a graphic novel. It’s an expanded version of McGuire’s groundbreaking comic of the same name.

What an eerie trip this book was. Reading it, seated in the corner of my own living room, wondering “what has happened in this very room over the past century? What highs and what lows? Who has cried where I’m sitting? Who had happy birthday sung to them? How many puppies and kitties have slept here? What were their names? What was here before this building? What will be centuries from now?”

And how lovely is it that it only takes a few hours to read this book and experience all that for yourself?

• The Hand, by Frank R. Wilson.

• Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen, by Dylan Horrocks.

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire.

Story time.

It’s September 2018. I’m in Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon.

I have a friend who’s a big fan of popular education, a topic I know next to nothing about. But I figure I can find a book about it in this behemoth of a store. I remember the name of this book and its author, head to the education section to find it. I can’t find it.

To a sales clerk I say, I’m looking for this book, I’m not sure that you even have it, could you help me find it? and I show her the name.

She furrows her brow and says “Ooohhh, I know this book. This book is always hiding in the wrong places.” This book is a troublemaker, she says with her tone. This book is up to no good, she says with her eyes.

At last we find the book, this pesky book. This book that’s up to no good. And lo, this book is challenging, but rewarding. And if I’m being completely honest, which I am, it was a damn hard read that I’ll need to revisit when I’m feeling better.

• To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, by Jenny Han.

I’m team Ms Rothschild.

Here’s to the next 881 books!