I’m thinking about writing reviews for each of the 52 books I’m planning on reading next year:
They may be short or long reviews, but I want to leave some log of reading beyond checking off a box on my to-do list. It would be really motivating to know that there is at least one person who has expressed an interest in reading a review for a specific book, hence this bounty:
Rules:
The overall theme here for selections is “everyone really ought to have read this by EOY 2024 (because [reasons]).” Please provide your reasoning in the comments.
I make no stipulations as to genre (fiction or nonfiction is fine, specialist academic lit like textbooks is also good, academic journals are not) but ask you to keep your recs limited to physical, paper media. (No ebooks/audiobooks/visual novels/video games/etc.)
Note: you do not actually have to have read your recommendation yourself, or have firm plans to do so in the future, but you must still be interested in reading a review on it to submit for the purposes of this bounty.
English or Japanese texts only, please.
10 mana per recommendation that I actually add to my reading list for next year. If I really enjoy reading your rec, I may send you a managram bonus at some point randomly next year.
The most likely books to be picked are those that seem especially salient re: current events OR those universal works that anyone “well-read” would be embarrassed to admit they have not, well, read.
(Books in both categories must be ones I have not read/read in a long time. I’ve read pretty much everything your average geeky Joe Millennial with a college degree and three bookshelves has, so don’t be afraid to be a little imaginative/specific/obscure here. I don’t have any content restrictions except please do not recommend irredeemably sinful smut. I don’t want to discuss any titles that would get me banned here.)
Looking forward to seeing what you all come up with! (The cut-off date for receiving a bounty is EOY 2023.)
Elinor Ostrom - Governing the Commons (because it shows concrete points in history where groups of people have come face to face with Moloch, and either triumphed or didn't, and because it draws conclusions on the basis of these points that have implications for how we go about coordinating in the future https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1048424)
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This book is a classic of modernist lit, and represents Joyce at a point where he's beginning his experimentation with his trademark stream-of-consciousness style, but hasn't progressed so far with it that it makes the book hard to read like Ulysses or the complete nonsense that is Finnegans Wake. I'd recommend it just for the part where Steven is at a religious retreat and the priests are describing the horrors of hell, which is one of the most harrowing descriptions of it I've ever encountered in any literature. The rest of the book is really good too, but that's one part that almost everyone who's read this book remembers.
this one is also on my list, though not from any insight or recommendation, I just spotted it somewhere along the way
The Mushroom at the End of the World
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25510906-the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
I read it and liked it. It's written by a state department employee who was on the ground in Iraq.
"Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets that lack water and electricity?
As Peter Van Buren shows, we bought all these projects and more in the most expensive hearts-and-minds campaign since the Marshall Plan. We Meant Well is his eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surge―that surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed. Leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team on its quixotic mission, Van Buren details, with laser-like irony, his yearlong encounter with pointless projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded in the world's largest embassy, who fail to realize that you can't rebuild a country without first picking up the trash."
I think it's still relevant. It's echoed in the the bungled evacuation from Afghanistan, among other things. Also other forms of government dysfunction.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to understand the world we live in without reading Ex Machina by Brian K Vaughan and Tony Harris
(May be an exaggeration)
haven't read this yet but it was highly recommended by a few people at a Book Swap I went to recently so it's on my 2024 list for a similar market :)
Tanya Tagaq - Split Tooth
Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45974.The_Book_of_Disquiet