What did I read last year?

A reading list from the second year of the pandemic

I took more time to read in 2021 than I had in recent years. It was a concerted effort to free myself from the relentless news cycle and process what I was thinking, seeing and feeling in a world seemingly spinning out of control. I enjoyed all of these immensely, and each played some role in making me appreciate the times we live in - for good and bad - and helped shape the small steps I took last year to create the world I want for myself and others. I feel like sharing a reading list carries equal risk of being judged for being pretentious or pedestrian, so take them for what they are.?

I was a history major in college. One of my Gallup Strengths is “context” (I have to “look back because that is where the answers lie. [I] look back to understand the present.”). Despite that, I don’t normally go out of my way to read a lot of historical nonfiction, but In the wake of the Capital Insurrection, I was inspired to reflect on “how we got here.”?

I started with Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth. Grandin argues the narrative that sustained us for 300-400 years - the expansion of the frontier and the American exceptionalism it fostered - had collapsed; No longer able to project our political and economic conflicts out on other people/markets and opportunities, the closing of the American frontier forced us to turn inward on ourselves, producing the sharp divisions we see today.

Connecting with and sharing space with others is a way to find understanding and overcome division. The late Tony Horowitz’ Spying on the South, An Odyssey Across the American Divide speaks to that with humor and a historical connection that resonated with me deeply. Horowitz retraces the journey of a young Frederick Law Olmstead through the South on the eve of the Civil War, “seeking dialogue and common ground,” before he designed Central Park and committed to a career “creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all” as America’s foremost landscape architect. I live in New York City because I am energized by so many people from so many different walks of life. I could not live in New York City without its parks.

To that end, I also read Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York, which is a surprisingly breezy read through the history of New York City as revealed through the place names of its streets and neighborhoods. Reading it as the city was lurching to life after an incredibly painful year of sickness, death and economic heartache was a salient reminder of how power dynamics shift over time and of New York’s incomparable ability to reinvent itself.

Colson’ Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is a searing fictional, but true to life, account of survivors of an abusive Florida reform school. It feels on one hand like a “must read” to understand the type of pain and abuse that was all too common, yet accepted and hidden in plain sight during the 20th century. But the book had an unexpected and personally gratifying twist, with one of the main characters living, later in life, in more contemporary times in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York. Migration, renewal, reinvention are part of the American fabric, and nowhere more evident than in New York.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was meant to be a beach read several years ago, but I never got to it. I won’t try to give the book the critical justice that better reviewers than I have, but it is a wild and amazing read about identity, history, legacy that spans the 1950s Dominican Republic and 1980s New Jersey. Far more tragicomic than the Nickel Boys, it is also a satisfying immersion into a personal and familial journey far different from my own, but crucially part of the rich American experience.

This fall, after hearing Dave Eggers discuss his new novel The Every on a podcast, my reading took a darker turn again as I began to more seriously confront the impact big tech is having on us all. Eggers, who does not own a smartphone, spoke to so much of the dissonance I’ve been feeling - the loss of control and privacy and the endless manipulation in service of convenience and being “connected.” I was fascinated and eager to pick it up. But I decided I couldn’t read it before reading the Circle, the predecessor to the Every. Then I decided I couldn’t read the Circle before reading 1984.

Let me make a rather un-profound statement: 1984 remains a must read. I tried to avoid drawing too straight a line to our current fixation on creeping authoritarianism, real and perceived, lest I fall into the meme “this is literally 1984.” But the salience of the themes to today are arresting. We have voluntarily ceded the broad surveillance envisioned by Orwell to private industry and are easily pacified by the convenience and entertainment offered in return. But the other themes - the scrubbing of language and narrowing of acceptable thought and discourse, the use of political propaganda to create false narratives and alternative facts, even cynically erasing recent history and expecting you to pretend that which you know happened did not… These are, unfortunately, the currency of politics in 2020, weaponized across social media to divide us.

The Circle was released in 2013, which means Eggers probably wrote it in 2011/12. That’s impressive, because we now know that is when the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media began having a demonstrable impact on teen mental health. While his vision of the collapse of privacy in the dystopian near future at the hands of the social media/search conglomerate the Circle is more dependent on hardware surveillance than we are now (streaming cameras everywhere - a la 1984 !), he nails the idea that the imperative to share everything leads to an unraveling - of your psyche, relationships, and yes, democracy.

Out of order, but ending here on a bright note, is John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet. In the spring, I heard Green discuss his new book, and ordered one of his signed copies before I even finished the podcast episode. “Surviving” the first year of the pandemic left me reflective and appreciative of the small moments that make life worth living - as a parent, husband, son and human. Green’s book - a collection of five star reviews of “various facets of the human-centered planet”, was a poignant and perfectly timed reminder of the things and experiences that make us human. One quote, at the end of a chapter about the remarkable journey of Polish goalkeeper Jerzey Dudek from obscurity, to near failure then triumph in the European Champions League helped me get through the second year of the pandemic:

You can't see the future coming - not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.