This year I read just shy of a book a week1. For me, that pace is new and surprising. It’s considerably more than any previous year, and owed in large part to audiobooks. 2023 marked a change in lifestyle for me, one with much more motion in it to resolve a long struggle I’ve had with backpain. This motion — usually walking, sometimes running — is usually accompanied by an audiobook of some sort. The result is that half the books I’ve “read” this year were actually listened to.
It’s my experience that the format doesn’t lend itself to every genre, much less every title. Simon Sarris captures it well:
Audiobooks vary tremendously in quality. The performer is almost as important as the author.
So sampling titles (performances?) is a lot more important for the spoken word than written.
I’ve heard it said that audiobooks aren’t absorbed as well as written books and I’d agree. I’m rarely as attentive to the content when I’m going for a run verses reading quietly in bed. But this is easily worked around. Most of the books I’ve listened to are biographies. The kinds of books where missing a little detail doesn’t matter as long as you get the overall picture.
Something I rarely see credited is the way a spoken performance can bring the text to life. My standout read for the year, and among the most impactful books I’ve ever read, was Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, an account of Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to Antarctica. The book is powerful in its own right, but Simon Prebble’s performance of it makes it all the better. The metre, the excitement and the accents all combine to make it so much more thrilling.
With my rant about audiobooks over, here’s some of my favourites from this year:
Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstacy, a biographical novel about Michelangelo Buonarroti. This was the first time I’d read a biographical novel as opposed to a biography and, christ, what a break from the dry and burdened prose of pure fact.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I imagine every American reading this was assigned it twice in high school. And the long list of awards and commendations makes it no surprise. But boy, was it good. So good. Steinbeck’s way of exploring the people, the place, and the times is so vivid and immersive.
Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters, which is a compendium of blog posts. This is a read I’d only really recommend to computer people. Graham is a divisive character in the tech industry so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But he gave shape to a lot of the doubts I’d had about myself throughout my career and delightfully dispelled them:
All the time I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of my mind that I ought to know more theory, and that it was very remiss of me to have forgotten all that stuff within three weeks of the final exam.
Now I realize I was mistaken. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry. You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or a regular expression library. Painters in fact have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.
And then:
I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape.
For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn’t hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.
I can’t tell you how liberating this was to read. I’d worked this way for years and had never drawn the parallel. Irving Stone’s book concurred: Michelangelo didn’t spend long planning his work, he just took chisel to rock and “found” the form within it.
Other notable segments include his summary of schooling:
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn’t want to have too much to do with the kids.
Overblown? A little. But certainly some truth. And finally, some excerpts on why being young is a miserable experience these days:
Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren’t left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.
I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren’t crazy.
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.
If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in.
While I think this oversimplies, I like the notion that kids need to feel useful. And useful in a real sense, outside the artifice of schooling itself. Probably this is why computer kids typically do well out of school: the barriers to being immediately useful to society are low enough that a high schooler can do it. And there’s rarely any formal qualification required as with other trades and professions.
- 1.
It's always struck me as obnoxious when people talk about how many books they've read as if it's a contest. So it's with some reservation that I share the above. Talking about it has helped me reflect on what I enjoyed and why, so I hope you'll forgive my transgression.