2016 Year in Reading

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, December 31, 2016

December 31st is my time to contemplate my year in reading. I pick my favorite novels and nonfiction books, and I pick my book of the year. Unfortunately, I’m disturbed to discover that I don’t have any favorite novels for this year. Usually, I read several works of fiction that profoundly move me. This year none did. I need to concentrate on finding great novels in 2017.

I read several good novels, but none that had a deep impact. That’s partly due to so much rereading. Stand on Zanzibar and Hyperion are fantastic books, but this was my third reading for both, and I’m not inclined to list them as books that wowed me this year. I will say I was most impressed with the stories I read by Philip Wylie, Barbara Pym, Charlie Jane Anders, Walker Percy, and Keith Roberts, which were all new reads. I enjoyed them, admired them, but I’m not sure I’d recommend them to a general audience. Each will appeal to a selective group.

I read 55 books this year, about average for me. I read 15 books published during the year, which fulfills the goal I made in 2015 to read more new books. I failed at reading fewer novels. I meant to read only 12 but read 23.

Nonfiction was another matter in 2016. I’m going to have a very hard time picking my top five nonfiction books. Here are the books I wholeheartedly recommend as solidly good books that should appeal to most readers of their topics:

• Science Wars (Great Course lecture) by Steven L. Goldman (the philosophical evolution of science)
• The Search for Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick (PKD during his best writing years)
• The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (art and memory, excellent example of memoir)
• I Am Alive And You Are Dead by Emmanuel Carrere (the best bio on Philip K. Dick)
• How Great Science Fiction Works (Great Course lecture) by Gary K. Wolfe (history of science fiction)
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (black lives matter)
• Dark Money by Jane Meyer (corruption in America)
• Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman (memory)
• Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson (hilarious humor and mental illness)
• Saving Capitalism by Robert B. Reich (title says it all)
• When Everything Changed by Gail Collins (why women’s rights had greater impact than computers 1961-2007)
• Sex Object by Jessica Valenti (personal view of being a sex object)
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (raising a bird of prey, excellent memoir)
• Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein (statistical reporting on being a sex object)
• Leonard by William Shatner (loving memory of Mr. Spock)
• A Brief History of Misogyny by Jack Holland (exactly what the title says)
• The Big Picture by Sean Carroll (sweeping overview of cosmology, physics, and philosophy)
• Time Travel: A History by James Gleick (all the ramifications of time and time travel)
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (the nature of consciousness)
• The Bible Unearth by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (comparing archeology to Bible history)
• The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (all about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky)
• Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance (poor and white in America, fantastic example of memoir)
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (pushing people to their creative limit, state of the art creative nonfiction)
• Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Eliott Friedman (textual analysis, history, religion, and authorship)

Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2016

• Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Eliott Friedman (1987)
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (2016)
• Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance (2016)
• Dark Money by Jane Meyer (2016)
• Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman (2016)

It was extremely hard to limit my favorites down to five. Most of the nonfiction I read this year were exceptional reads. Quite often, as I read these books, I assumed I had my book of the year.

Because I didn’t have a novel of the year, that makes the book of the year obvious:

Book of the Year

This is pretty amazing considering I’m an atheist. You might think I’m secretly religious since I also picked Jesus Before the Gospels as another top five book. Ehrman’s book is really about memory, and I’m obsessed with the topic of memory. I’ve tried to read The Bible several times in my life, but always bog down in the boring books of the middle. All the best Bible stories are in The Book of Genesis, The Book of Exodus, the four Gospels, and The Book of Revelation. What Friedman does is explain the documentary hypothesis, its history, and evolution, and then refines it with his latest research and analysis. This made the boring books of The Bible fascinating. Reading Who Wrote the Bible? along with The Bible Unearthed made me see The Bible as history and not religion. Such knowledge only purifies my atheism by showing that The Bible is not what I was told it was as a child. The Bible a wonderful book about learning how humans thought 2,500-3,000 years ago. Figuring out that the Hebrew bible probably had four authors (J, E, D, P) and one editor (the redactor), and why they wrote what they wrote, let me see why it was written. It was really about politics and creating a nation, and not spirituality. (By the way, I know it is still debatable if some of those authors were not teams of writers and editors.)

On one hand, I wished humanity would just forget religion. On the other hand, all the clues to how we thought thousands of years ago are embedded in ancient religious texts from around the world. Studying these works show we haven’t changed, and it’s not likely we will. Our culture has evolved significantly, acquiring knowledge and technology, but the various ranges of human actions, thinking and emotions have not. Knowing this goes a long way to understanding my second favorite book of the year, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. Both of these books decode the political events of 2016. We really don’t change. For example, the modern conflict between Sunni and Shiites was reflected in the power struggles described by the Deuteronomists, with the descendants of Moses and Aaron, or why J and E wanted their stories in The Book of Genesis. I picked Who Wrote The Bible? as my book-of-the-year because it added to most new details to my map of reality.

Books Read 2016 (Links are to essays I wrote about these books)

My goal for 2017 is to try and read more nonfiction, especially new books. I’m not going to worry about how many works of fiction I read, but I do want to work harder at finding the best fiction possible. I also want to stop reading mediocre books.

JWH