Favorite Reads from 2014

Read some great books this past year. I'd say these were my favorite … 6:

Open City by Teju Cole
Beautiful immigrant novel about a Nigerian doctor and flaneur on the streets of New York with an unexpected twist

This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg
Excellent non-fiction about the history of leaks in general and Wikileaks, specifically, primarily the rise of digital leaks, hactivism and cypherpunks.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
Superlative short fiction which examines the Jewish experience, both religious and secular, in the past and present, here in the United States and in Israel.

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
The shifting of a woman’s identity after a car accident leaves her unrecognizable to most people.

Under the Skin by Michel Faber
Tour de force satire about an unusual woman stalking male hitchhikers in Scotland. Also made into the great flick by Jonathan Glazer. Not for all tastes, it’s a disturbing read in a way I probably haven’t experienced since reading Will Self’s scathing Great Apes years ago.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer
Not just a tribute to the heroic spirit of Pat Tillman and how the Bush administration abused his life and service, but also a detailed account of our fumblings as a nation in Afghanistan and how we created the complicated quagmire we ended up wading into.

I'd also recommend Lowboy by John Wray and The Steel Spring by Per Wahlöö.

How about you? Any recommendations?

The Distance Between Us

This Kickstarter campaign for photographer Christopher Capozziello is really worth your support. The subject of his book is his relationship with his twin brother Nick, who has cerebral palsy. The photography is extraordinary. Full disclosure: Chris shot our wedding and I'm a big fan. He's very close to meeting his goal on Kickstarter, but could use your help. 

Send to Trash After Reading

The last two years, I've reviewed a book of the year's best technology writing. If I could vote on entries for this year's, I'd have to include this New Yorker piece by Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. In it, he explains how the Kindle is still light years away from providing a superlative reading experience. Some consider Baker a bit of a neo-Luddite, but I can't sling that pejorative at such a good writer - especially since by the article's end, he does recommend using the iPhone with the Kindle app, as well as several other apps.

The whole article's definitely worth a read, but I found this section in particular on the experience of reading The New York Times on the Kindle particularly telling.

The real flurry over the new DX, though, has to do with the fate of newspapers. The DX offers more than twice as much Vizplex as the Kindle 2—about half the area of a piece of letter-size paper—enough, some assert, to reaccustom Web readers to paying for the digital version of, say, the Times, thereby rescuing daily print journalism from financial ruin. “With Kindle DX’s large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever,” according to Amazon’s Web site.

It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren’t there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times—Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin’s resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson’s funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees—were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven’t managed to find them (they’re available free on the Times Web site); the July 9th Kindle issue lacked the print edition’s reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20th and 21st: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

Emphasis mine.

None of this is to say that the Kindle (or, more accurately, the e-reader) isn't a revolutionary device. But sometimes we can get so caught up cheering on the technology that we overlook its obvious deficiencies.

Also,

• New York mag article in which Lane Brown guesstimates Baker's expenses for the piece, only to be corrected by him in comments.
• Stephen Johnson's more positive forecast for the impact of the e-reader on the future of books in April 20th's Wall Street Journal. He concludes, "We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?"
• On the Media podcast from May 8, 2009 on a Senate committee hearing on the "Future of Journalism."

Image above from my Flickr stream

Banned Books Week

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." -  Thomas Jefferson

It's Banned Books Week again from September 27th - October 4th, so pony up a few dollars for a copy of Catcher in the Rye - or the American Heritage Dictionary for that matter or pull that neglected copy of Huck Finn out of storage and give it another read.

Delete Censorship has a great list of 100 Most Frequently Banned or Challenged Books . Here are three of my favorites:

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - hard to know what impact this book would have on me if I read it now for the first time, but when I read it as a teenager, I wept like a baby. A great little novel, with great details (Curely's Vaseline-filled glove), which we tend to take for granted after being forced to read it.
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - the irony of religious groups attempting to ban a book about persecution by the religious should, of course, be lost on no one. And those folk would do well to remember that The Bible consistently appears in lists of banned books, along with the works of Shakespeare, The Koran. In 2003, a Cuban court even ordered copies of The U.S. Constitution destroyed.  In other words, who gets to decide what's offensive?
• The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende - what's not to love about this rich, colorful work of fiction? Guess it must have some saucy passages that offended the more prudish.
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding - not the sunniest appraisal of human nature and how quickly civilization can deteriorate - I imagine it offends both liberals who believe we're all innately good and conservative horrified by kids murdering each other. In other word, it's probably a fairly accurate portrayal of what would happen. Alex Garland added a decade to everyone's age and had a hit with The Beach, so you there's something about the scenario we find compelling. 

Keep in mind, those are just the 100 most frequently banned or challenged - that's "out of 6,364 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association."