Reading Rundown

It's great to have time to read more! I just did a quick count, and in the 20 months since I stopped working I've read around 35 books, so that's close to two books a month. This post is a summary of a few of the books I've enjoyed lately.

One that has really stuck with me is When We Cease to Understand the World by Chilean author Benjamin Labatut. I find myself thinking about it often. It's a strange book, one that I wasn't sure about when I read a description of it, but once I got started I couldn't put it down.

Originally published in Spanish under the name Un Verdor Terrible ("a terrible greening"), When We Cease to Understand the World is a collection of inter-related stories about the lives of scientists and mathematicians in the 20th Century, in particular those who were doing research that enabled the development of nuclear weapons. In the author's own words, the book is about "the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction."

Although each chapter is a discrete story of a period within a particular person's life, the connections between those stories create a narrative arc that holds everything together. The cast of characters ranges from Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger to Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and many others. Their stories take place across Europe and the United States, but the book ends in a small village high in the South American Andes, with a former mathematician who likes to work in his garden during the darkness of night.

When We Cease to Understand the World is historical fiction – much of it is true, but the author also takes some liberties to make the stories flow. For example, there are little details of what characters were thinking in private moments, things that only they could have known. The end result is a story that reads like carefully crafted fiction, but the characters and main events are all quite real.

There is a recurring theme of how our world has grown so complex that even the greatest minds can no longer comprehend it, as summarized in this excerpt:

“Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
– Benjamin Labatut,
When We Cease to Understand the World

Another book I read last year was Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, the story of an epic cattle drive through the heart of the United States, from the Mexican border in southern Texas to near the Canadian border in northern Montana. Whereas Labatut's book made me think about some things, this book made me feel some things.

Megan's aunt Marsha recommended it to me, and although I'm not much of a fan of westerns I gave it a shot and loved it. Lonesome Dove has a large cast of characters, and many of them feel like a type that we've all known. When Marsha recommended the book she said, "I feel like knowing Gus McRae has made me a better person, " which struck me as odd at the time, but after getting to know Gus myself I feel the same way. It's easy to fall in love with his lack of self-pity and his clear-eyed focus on simply enjoying every moment of every day.

I enjoyed Lonesome Dove so much that I wanted to know more about the characters, so I went on to read the other three books in the series: the sequel Streets of Laredo, and the two prequels Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon. The prequels cover the rise of Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae as legendary Texas Rangers, as well as the backstories of other key characters from Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo follows an elderly Woodrow Call trying to remain true to himself while dealing with slow decline of his mind and body.

For years, I've been meaning to read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and I finally read it – or rather, listened to it — on the way to and from Seattle last fall. It was an entertaining journey through the 18th Century English countryside, where love and marriage were duties to be performed in accordance with well-defined rules that revolved around family fortunes and social status.

I've read so few renowned classic novels, and whenever I read one I tend to have a similar reaction: "ah, I can see why that book is so popular." Another classic I recently read was As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. While I was somewhat familiar with the plot of Pride and Prejudice, having seen the movie in 2006, I knew nothing about As I Lay Dying when I started it. An entire book about hauling a corpse to a cemetery? It works! I can see why that book is so popular, too.

I've always had an interest in US history, and I decided last year — in the midst of a bitterly divided Presidential election in the US – that I wanted to learn more about the Civil War. I've read many US history books set before and after it, but the only Civil War book I had ever read was Michael Shaara's brilliant The Killer Angels, which only covers the Battle of Gettysburg and events leading up to it. So I picked up a few critically acclaimed books about the Civil War, and so far I've read two of them.

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson tells the story of the five months between Lincoln's election and the start of the Civil War. I've read two other books by Erik Larson, Devil in the White City and Garden of Beasts, and he has done it again in Demon of Unrest, creating a historically accurate deep dive that reads like an epic novel. Garden of the Beasts captured the feeling of helpless dread leading up to WWII, and Demon of Unrest makes the Civil War feel similarly ominous and inevitable.

After that I read S. C. Gwynne's Hymns of the Republic, which covers the sheer brutality and savage hatred of the conflict during the final year of the war. I'm glad I read it and now know about those events, but I doubt I'll ever get back to the other Civil War books I picked up. I think I've had enough of that topic.

“There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.” – Abraham Lincoln

China is rapidly headed toward becoming the world's greatest superpower, but many of us are old enough to remember when China was struggling under Chairman Mao's heavy hand. From the tens of millions who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, to the millions who died in the purges of the Cultural Revolution, the China of my youth wasn't seen as a success story by anyone other than Mao and his minions.

China in Ten Words is a book by Yu Hua, a Chinese author born in 1960. Banned in China, it's an unflinching personal memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution and beyond. The book is structured around ten two-character (in Mandarin) words – people, leader, reading, writing, Lu Xun, revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat, and bamboozle – with a chapter on how each word relates to life in China during the 1960s through 1990s. The stories of his childhood are fascinating and terrifying, and the chapters on copycat and bamboozle explain aspects of China's business culture that I've never seen explained so clearly before.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is a book that instantly rang true to me when I read it last summer. Aurelius lived in the 2nd Century AD, and is considered to be the last of the Five Good Emperors of Rome. Meditations was essentially his journal, a collection of notes to self that he liked to read every morning, and he never intended for it to be published. In fact, he left instructions for it to be burned upon his death, but a bookkeeper decided that it should be saved for posterity.

Meditations is considered a core text of the philosophy of stoicism, because it contains numerous self-admonishments on how to live a satisfying and meaningful life as a stoic, with a relentless focus on the distinction between events inside and outside your own control. In Marcus Aurelius' view, worrying about things like death, pain, poverty, or ridicule are self-indulgent activities, and the only valid fear a good person should have is the fear of not living up to their potential. I've always been a fan of getting up early, and after reading Meditations I found myself getting up even earlier every day, eager to take on the world.

"All men suffer, but not all men pity themselves."
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Cormac McCarthy is the author of one of my favorite novels, Blood Meridian. Before I retired, I had read five of McCarthy's twelve books: Blood Meridian, the three books of his border trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain), and The Road. After retiring, I decided to finish reading all of Cormac McCarthy's novels.

I started with Suttree, his semi-autobiographical story of a drunken fishermen who lives in a shack along the Tennessee River in Knoxville in the early 1950s. Cornelius Suttree is a man born into high society who, for reasons that never become completely clear, has forsaken his family and their money for a simple and nearly destitute existence as a member of a community of drunks, derelicts, petty criminals, beggars, prostitutes, and other social outcasts. The book has a fragmented story line that makes use of flashbacks in a way that reminded me of Pulp Fiction, and there is much more humor than in McCarthy's other works, especially in the scenes involving Gene Harrogate, a harebrained and lovable misfit among misfits.

Next up was No Country for Old Men, a neo-western crime thriller that moves at a faster pace than McCarthy's other books. After reading it, I learned that it was originally written as a screenplay, but when McCarthy got no interest in it from movie studios he repackaged it as a novel. Two years after the novel was published, a critically acclaimed movie version was released starring Javier Bardem, Tommie Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, and Kelly Macdonald. We hadn't seen the movie, so we watched it after I read the book. The movie leaves out some things to make the story flow better in a visual medium, but they're both great.

After that I read McCarthy's first three novels, written in the 60s and 70s: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God. These books are all set in Appalachia in the early 20th century, and their stories are dark. How dark? Well, a teacher in a small Texas town lost their job for assigning Child of God to a 14-year old. But in addition to the creepy subject matter, these books were where McCarthy developed his unique writing style, which most critics feel reached its pinnacle in the book he wrote next, his magnum opus Blood Meridian.

And finally, to complete the list, I read the two companion books The Passenger and Stella Maris. These were McCarthy's final two novels, published in 2022 (he died in 2023).

The Passenger follows the life of Bobby Western, a salvage diver working along the Gulf Coast in the 1980s who is haunted by his inability to prevent the suicide of his little sister Alicia, who is madly and inappropriately in love with him.

Stella Maris, McCarthy's final novel and a prequel to The Passenger, is the one I saved for last. I wasn't even sure if I wanted to read it. I love his books set in the epic wilderness of the Western US and Mexico, but Stella Maris is set entirely in an insane asylum in Wisconsin, where Alicia lived her final days before committing suicide. The book is mostly dialog from the daily meetings Alicia has with her assigned shrink. How could that be interesting?

For me, one reason it turned out to be interesting is because Alicia is obsessed with so many of the same mathematicians and scientists that I was obsessed with as a young math geek: Carl Friedrich Gauss, Leonhard Euler, Kurt Gödel, Richard Feynman, and many others. I enjoyed this book more than I expected to, because I appreciated the way it played on people and concepts from math history that were familiar to me. And McCarthy's ear for dialog makes some of the exchanges between Alicia and her unnamed shrink remarkably thought-provoking.

Stella Maris is McCarthy's only book with a woman as the lead character, and he once said that he had planned for 50 years to write a book about a woman. Some critics have pointed out that Alicia's bizarre personality and mathematical obsession are evidence that McCarthy didn't really understand how to create a truly feminine character. I'll let the critics decide that sort of thing, but Alicia was a fascinating and memorable character to me, whatever she is.

Now that I've completed Cormac McCarthy's body of work, I feel like these are my faves:

• Blood Meridian is still my favorite. It's hard to articulate why I enjoy it so much, but I tried to do that few years ago in this blog post.
• Suttree is a fun read (definitely the only Cormac McCarthy book where a word like fun comes to mind), and may appeal to those who can't stand McCarthy's other books; it has much hilarity and very little violence.
• All the Pretty Horses, a cowboy coming of age story set on the US/Mexican border in the 1950s, is gorgeous and heart-wrenching.
• Stella Maris is interesting if you're familiar with mathematicians of the 19th and 20th centuries. It may be boring and confusing if you're not.

I started this post with a weird book, so here's a weird one to end with: Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler. This was something that had been on my to-read list for a few years, and at around 300 pages was a quick read, so I made it the first thing I read after retiring. It's a fast-paced, thoroughly researched deep dive into a story that was kept under wraps for many years after World War II: how heavy drug use (especially methamphetamines) permeated the Nazi regime from top to bottom.

Blitzed is disturbing at times, but fascinating and hard to put down. Norman Ohler had only written fiction before taking on this project, and he thought that he was working on research for another novel when he started digging into the details of Nazi drug use. But he said in a Newsweek interview that he found the material "too hot ... to water it down into a fictional work," and so he decided to make it a non-fiction history book instead. That heat radiates from every chapter – this is not a book for the faint-hearted.

Those are the books I remember most vividly from the last couple of years. Going forward, the to-read list is longer than ever, and I'm currently working my way through another classic, Ulysses by James Joyce. I hope to be including that one and many others in another post like this, a year or so down the road.