Bookshelf Review: Q4 2023

Eli Bendersky's final reading list of 2023 spans science, history, fiction, and memoirs of labor. The quarter's standout works were in non-fiction, with a clear pattern: books that tackle grand, complex subjects with rigor and clarity earned the highest praise.

Science and Nature

Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World is a dense, rapid-fire tour of biochemistry, packed with enough material for several graduate courses. The pace is demanding, but the depth of ideas rewards multiple readings.

For a more accessible science read, Mapping the Deep by Robert Kunzig offers a well-organized history of oceanography. Similarly, The Age of Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte - written for younger readers - is lauded as an excellent, methodical overview reflecting recent paleontological discoveries.

An Elegant Defense by Matt Richtel covers the immune system from a journalist's perspective. While technically inferior to Philipp Dettmer's Immune, it compensates with a stronger human focus. The book carries a warning: descriptions of cancer and autoimmune disease are graphic.

History and Politics

Lights Out: Pride, Delusion and the Fall of General Electric by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann chronicles GE's decline over two decades. It serves as a sobering case study in how prioritizing immediate investor returns through buybacks and dividends can undermine a conglomerate's long-term health.

Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a challenging novel about the Soviet Great Terror, depicting how a random assassination triggers arbitrary arrests and executions across the power structure. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing offers a beautifully written account of the 1914 Antarctic expedition's harrowing survival story.

Fiction and Memoir

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others is praised for its highly original, risk-taking sci-fi, though some tales border on the absurd. The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (books 1-4) present a self-aware security bot addicted to soap operas, but the novellas' similar trajectories and lengthy action sequences grow tiresome. Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - about friends building a game company - holds up well for its first two-thirds before succumbing to banal plot twists.

In nonfiction, Finn Murphy's The Long Haul offers amusing stories about long-distance moving, drawing an unexpected parallel between movers' deep focus while packing and engineers' "flow" state. Nomadland by Jessica Bruder is an interesting, non-preachy look at older Americans living in vans and working seasonal jobs.

Thought-provoking but flawed, Jonah Berger's The Catalyst on changing minds has a low signal-to-noise ratio despite useful ideas. Eula Biss's On Immunity is "markedly odd" - it embeds arguments for vaccination within dense personal memoir, making the case difficult to extract but potentially effective as a subtle nudge for skeptics.

Two lighter picks round out the list: Charlotte Foltz Jones's Mistakes That Worked for kids about accidental inventions (wishing for more detail), and a Russian-language collection of short stories by a relative, Gregory Khait, spanning topics from the moon race to jury duty in San Francisco.

Re-reads

  • Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg
  • What You Should Know About Politics... But Don't by Jessamyn Conrad