This Godforsaken Year’s Book Favorites
If nothing else, 2020 was a good year for reading when I wasn’t in an endless Zoom meeting. Here are the books I enjoyed reading the most in the strange, quarantined year of 2020. Let me know what you think.
How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan
This book is masterfully written. Michael Pollan treats the topic of psychedelics with an attitude of appropriate scientific skepticism, but with an undoubted curiosity for its potential to change the way human beings experience our own minds’ perception of reality. His account of the scientific and political histories of various psychedelic substances is excellent. If you’ve never had even the remotest interest in psychedelics, you’ll come away from this book with broader horizons of understanding. 10/10 will probably read again.
Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, by angel Kyodo Williams
I picked up this book after hearing the author give a few public talks in Austin in 2019. It is a challenging and aching case for social healing through shared experience. Our liberation, spiritual or otherwise, is bound up with everyone else’s. Until all of us are free, none of us are free. It’s a powerful story of faith and the reckoning of America’s racist founding, where Buddhism meets Blackness in America. I dare you to read it.
Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus, by Nicholas A. Christakis
Few are the numbers who actually understand the history of pandemics, how infectious disease science works, nor how our understanding of the SARS-2 virus came to be such a massive problem (particularly for us in the U.S). Nicholas Christakis has set out to correct our understanding in an accessible way. It blew my mind that he managed to write a book on this topic so quickly - literally in the middle of the plague the book centrally features. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is remotely interested in an accurate history of this plague that has rocked all our lives, as well as a scientifically grounded comparison of it against previous outbreaks in history.
The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen
I’ll start out by saying that I read this book in response to my reading of Empire Of The Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne, which I found to be both racist and wanting in depth. Whereas Gwynne portrayed the Comanche people through the Eurocentric lens of yet another, albeit interesting, indigenous tribe waiting to be subjugated by colonizing forces in the inevitable march of manifest destiny, Hämäläinen more accurately portrays the Comanche as a powerful, mobile empire that managed to successfully destabilize 4 colonial powers and dominated a majority of the Great Plains for centuries. While Gwynne treats the Comanche with surprise that they could possibly be such masterful horsemen, Hämäläinen digs deep into the details of the political and economic powerhouse that the Comanche really were. Thinking on it, I have spent virtually my entire life well within the boundaries of the Comancheria. So even though a bit academic, especially compared to Gwynne’s pop history style, the book was a remarkable read and historically instructive of the landmarks of my life.
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, by Dan Flores
The first book I read by Dan Flores absolutely floored me. Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History is one of the most well written works of ecological and political history I’ve ever read and I have always had a connection with Coyotes. So intrigued by this man’s thinking, I delved into a second work with a broader focus - a similar framework applied to the megafauna of the Great Plains. Discussing the history and fate of species that loom large in our imagination of the American past, Flores skillfully outlines what became of grizzlies, elk, bison, pronghorn, wolves, coyotes, and the land which many people call “flyover country” now. In particular, the chapter focused on Palo Duro Canyon, where I spent much of my recreational time in youth, was illuminating. We think we know a place. There’s history, but then there’s history. 10/10 will be reading again.
Honorable Mentions
On Human Nature, by E.O. Wilson
Dense, but worth a read. Exploring the landmark change in scientific discourse pertaining to Social Biology by its founder.
Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World, by Fareed Zakaria
I don’t watch much CNN so I’m not often exposed to Fareed Zakaria’s commentary, which probably made this book much more tolerable for me than most. I’m fascinated by people thinking about the world’s turn as we leave this pandemic era.
The Plague, by Albert Camus
A classic novel in the existential and absurdist vein of Camus. The topic was too on the nose not to read. The story is beautiful and well told.
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, by Hampton Sides
This book has BIG colonial energy, but is a fascinating read, not only about Kit Carson, but the many other players involved in the Mexican/American war and all the conquest entailed in the U.S’ westward expansion.
I hope you were able to do some reading this year. Perhaps you’d like to start reading more in 2021. If that’s the case, I hope this list is helpful. Once I ended my obsessive affair with social media, I found myself with a tremendous amount of time to engage with books. I also love audiobooks and can absorb them just as well as a paper copy, which makes for some really lovely time spent running and learning. Whatever your relationship with books, I hope you haven’t forgotten them. It’s easy to forget them. But don’t. Pick one up and just dive in for a few minutes here and there.