What I've been Reading #2

The rest of 2021 was a mixed bag for me reading-wise

True to form, I haven’t followed the to-read list on my last post closely, and have in fact deviated significantly. I also got a lot less reading done than I had planned, but that’s just life post-Covid being true to its own form¹. Some of these I haven’t quite finished yet, so starting with the ones I have:

The Midrange Theory, by Seth Partnow

Basketball is the one sport I follow quite obsessively. As even a cursory observer of this (or any) sport would know, analytics has permeated the space in a major way, spurring on a sea change in playstyle over the last decade. This book is essentially an overview of NBA basketball through the lens of analytics from the former Director of Basketball Research for the Milwaukee Bucks. The easiest and most enjoyable read of the year, my favorite chapter was the one where Partnow takes the reader through what a typical NBA season is like in an analytics department. Having followed his writing for years, the ideas are presented with their characteristic clarity backed by solid evidence.

Read this if you’re a basketball fan.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

This one was unputdownable. The unique narrative structure keeps you hooked throughout as the story alternates between the past and the present. If you’re a science nerd, this book is probably science nerd nirvana to you.

However, the most striking aspect of the book to me is Andy Weir’s completely insane optimism in humanity. He is a brave, brave man to have released this book smack dab in the middle of a pandemic that was exposing the absolutely pathetic manner in which governments and societies around the world coordinated with each other (if you can call it that) in the face of a global (though not existential) threat. You’ll get why I think Weir is insane when you read the entire book. This was an interesting contrast to the cynicism of the Remembrance of Earth’s past series, which I covered in my last post.

Read this if you’re into scifi and you want to see what 2-year-old-child-level-naive idealism looks like.

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

This was by far my weirdest read this year which left me with a lot of mixed feelings. An 800-page tragic story of four close friends (Jude, Willem, Malcolm, JB), the book started off on a really promising note, seamlessly shifting between the points of view of all 4 friends before gradually zooming in like a laser on Jude St Francis.

Good news first: as expected of a book on the Man Booker shortlist, the writing is truly superb and despite the length, this is an extremely readable book. I would not describe it as unputdownable, but the cadence lends itself well to hours-long stretches of reading (if you can spare the time). A quarter of the way in, the characters are quite compelling in their own unique ways. I was especially rather intrigued by Malcolm’s story and was curious to see where his character arc would lead.

This leads us to the bad news: I never really found out, though the possibility of returning to any of the other three friends apart from Jude was tantalizing. It’s not that Malcolm did not appear in the story later, but he faded to the background in a hurry, and the next few hundreds of pages following Jude in disturbingly close detail are an exercise in excessive torture porn.

Turns out this was critically acclaimed because it offered a (rather large) window into the extremely hard life of a disabled, suicidal, childhood abuse survivor. But at a certain point, when the misfortune just doesn’t stop piling up on Jude, you start to wonder whether the author is trying way too hard to drive these themes home.

One hopes this is not made into a series a la 13 Reasons Why; living in a post-Covid world is torture enough. Feel free to judge this book by its cover.

Read this if you’re into hard-hitting, emotional stories.

The Entrepreneurial State, by Mariana Mazzucato

This was one of my more interesting non-fiction reads this year. Mazzucato makes a compelling case for industrial policy in modern times, with a focus on ambitious, mission-oriented programs with some degree of specificity. In all, she makes a compelling case with dozens of examples of how government investment in research is at the very foundation of vast swathes of the economy, and even most of the technology we use. There is a particularly interesting chapter on how every individual component of the iPhone has its roots in government R&D programs (while giving due credit to Apple for putting them together). A short summary of her ideas can be found here.

However, Mazzucato has come in for criticism on three fronts: that industrial policy is not a guaranteed golden ticket and depends on the specifics of implementation, a failure to grapple with political realities (namely the Republican party’s mission to reduce state intervention in many areas except the precious few they favor), and outright dismissal of thinking about market failures which can be a useful tool. Of these three, I find the first two to be puerile. No endeavor is a sure thing, and the debate needs to move beyond the binary of “industrial policy or not” as beautifully detailed by Michael Pettis in this thread:

Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis

1/10 Very good and important article by @greg_ip. One of the problems with the debate over industrial policy is that ideology has forced many of us into a binomial position: either we support industrial policy because it has always been... wsj.com/articles/subsi… via @WSJ

wsj.com‘Industrial Policy’ Is Back: The West Dusts Off Old Idea to Counter ChinaAn approach long criticized as inefficient is being adopted by the U.S. to fund sectors such as semiconductors

As for the second, the political reality is far removed from physical reality in many ways in many places, but that is not an excuse for saying what needs to be done and how the potential of statism can be harnessed for good.

The third point has some merit: market failures can be a good guide as to which sectors to target interventions in, but when you consider the hold an exclusive market failure framework has had in economic discourse for so long, Mazzucato’s dismissal is not entirely unreasonable and there will always be a place for it.

Read this book if you’re into the history of development, statism, economics, technology, etc.

Dune, by Frank Herbert

Overrated is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the age of social media. But it applies to Dune, which is easily my worst read of this year and (the second-worst in the last 5 years²). The world-building is quite good but not fleshed out well enough to my liking. However, the characters that populate this world range from cliched to downright awful (with the possible exceptions of Lady Jessica and her daughter). There is a distinct sense of unfulfilled potential throughout and the plot is so pedestrian it probably needs its own sidewalk³. The writing is not especially compelling either, and the author does a uniquely idiotic thing by spoiling a few chapters in advance during an awful Baron Harkonnen monologue detailing his plans (which then unfold EXACTLY as he described). I am told the sequels could be compelling but the world and underlying themes of this story are too uninteresting for me to continue.

Read this if you want to be bored to death with yet another cliched hero’s journey story.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

This was the frontrunner for the weirdest read of the year before A Little Life. I was led to this from a list of sci-fi novels, though I would not categorize it as such. It’s about a girl trying to survive in a dystopian America. The dystopia is pretty vague; there are puritanical political groups, hallucinogenic drugs, poverty etc. all swirling together to form a heady cocktail of a country in dysfunction. The girl copes by trying to survive and trying to found a religion based on optimism. More specifically, this religion’s ultimate goal is to have humanity populate the stars.

Some people think this is the kind of message that pushes the frontiers of progress and at the very least is defiantly optimistic during tough times. Personally, I found myself sort of indifferent to the whole enterprise, though I will say it’s an interesting read. Not sure if I’ll pick up the sequel.

Read this if you’re into American dystopian fiction.

Code of the Woosters, by P.G.Wodehouse

I have a list of activities for which I’m willing to be put into suspended animation indefinitely, with only my head and eyes allowed to function:

1. Watching the opening scene of Baby Driver on repeat.

2. Reading PG Wodehouse.

End of list.

The genius of Wodehouse’s writing is not in the plot (though it’s generally good) or characters (sufficiently interestingly eccentric and weird) or themes (nothing serious or particularly deep). It’s purely an exercise in how to make the reader laugh at every second sentence, and he NEVER fails. Very rarely is it that the “form” (as opposed to underlying content) is the only attraction in a work of art (at least for me).

Read this if you need a guaranteed laugh.

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Books I’m not all the way through:

Collection of Short Stories by O Henry, Anton Chekhov, and Joseph Conrad

O Henry is a good writer with a penchant for reveals. His short stories are the equivalent of snack/coffee breaks during the day. 4-5 pages and you’re done. “Gift of the Magi” is the most famous among these, with good reason.

Chekhov is as bleak as the reputation of the great Russian novelists suggests. I read a couple of stories, and they’ve been intriguing so far.

I’m yet to get to Joseph Conrad, but hoping I will sometime this century. I don’t anticipate reading every short story in this book.

Read this if you’re afflicted with ADHD but want to kickstart your reading habit.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky

I’m a few chapters in, but contra Dostoevsky’s reputation, there is a surprisingly dry sort of humor in the story and writing so far. The cadence makes it a bit hard to read and I plan to resume from where I’ve paused once I get a physical copy in my hands instead of reading on my otherwise-trustworthy Kindle.

Read this if you’re not afflicted by ADHD and want to find out what the big deal is about Russian authors.

Dravidian Model, by Kalaiyarasan and Vijay Bhaskar

A history of how the Dravidian model led to superior rates of development and the formation of a dynamic economy (relatively speaking) in Tamil Nadu. An interesting read thus far, and there’s nothing quite like learning more about the history of the place where you grew up. Hopefully, I finish this soon to give a more detailed review.

Read this if you’re into development economics and Tamil Nadu.

Round Up The Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca, by Aljean Harmetz

Casablanca is one of my all-time favorite films. Given that this year saw pretty much every non-remake, non-sequel, non-cinematic universe film flop badly at the box office, it looks like this sort of proudly mainstream (at its time), well-written, well-acted, and well-directed film will stop hitting theatres, which is a pity. Rather than default to blaming corporations (scorpion gonna scorpion), the cold reality is that people today do not want to go to theatres for any other kind of film. The audience has spoken loud and clear about what they want on the big screen and what they want on streaming platforms. I’m still holding out a little hope but it’s really not looking good.

Coming back to the book⁴, there’s really nothing much to say. It’s a standard making-of-the-movie book: you get interesting anecdotes about the cast of characters and everyone else involved in the production which you will read because you love the characters on screen and you’re curious about the people behind them.

Read this if you’re into Casablanca.

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With this, we come to the end of the…..not so fast! Surprise third category:

There was one book I deliberately stopped reading and intend to not do so again:

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

It’s not that book is badly written or that it doesn’t make compelling points. The main thesis (and drawbacks of the same) are clear ~15% in. Both Davids push back against what they deem the traditional retelling of history where humans were small tribes of hunter-gatherers, then started/discovered agriculture, started settling in places, formed hierarchies, etc. Instead, they present examples of the extreme diversity of social arrangements in the prehistorical period and how we should all be more politically imaginative like our ancestors and get unstuck from one narrow set of socio-political arrangements.

I do agree that our ignorance of pre-history is tremendous and we shouldn’t assume too much of how our distant ancestors went about life. We simply don’t know much, and should be wary of defaulting to how some aspects of social arrangements are “natural”. But the Davids don’t provide a sufficient explanation for why statism (so-called servility in the opinion of the two anarchists) is now so prevalent across the world when the species lived for many millennia without it. If humans were so good at living without immutable hierarchies, why did we ultimately descend into this sorry state of affairs?

It doesn’t strike me as just a lack of political imagination on our part (one assumes humans are still creative). Also to what extent did modes of production and technical limits pre-determine such social arrangements? There have also been questions about how they’ve interpreted anthropological evidence, which is not surprising given the nature of the field we’re dealing with as well as Graeber’s reputation of playing fast and loose with the facts⁵.

The bottom line is that their core arguments are clear not long into the book, but ultimately not as profound or convincing as the advertising suggests.

A couple of interesting critiques I read of the book:

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/11/dawn-everything-new-history-humanity-david-graeber-wengrow-review

https://theecologist.org/2021/dec/17/all-things-being-equal

If you made it this far, thanks a lot for reading. I will not embarrass myself by posting a to-read list this time. Let the chips fall where they may.

1. How long am I going to use this excuse? Lol.

2. The top honor belongs to Sprawlball, a god-awful book that went viral in basketball circles when it had absolutely nothing interesting or even new to say about anything.

3. I make bad puns when irritated.

4. No, I did not include it here just for the sake of that digression about cinema, I actually am reading it. And before you say anything, Dune simply doesn’t count as a victory for cinema; the story sucks and Villenueve has zero sense of pacing as usual (cinephiles interpret this as him “building tension”).

5. Google “Graeber Apple IBM”. The search results do not inspire confidence in the rigor of his work.