Results for “best non-fiction”

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I’ve already covered best economics books, best fiction, and the very best books.  General non-fiction remains missing.  It’s been a very good year, and these are the other non-fiction books which I really liked, a stronger list than the year before:

Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country.

Daniel Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev.

Frank Brady,  Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.

Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination.  In the waning of Franco’s time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy?  Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment?  Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that?  Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (does Adrian Bulli understand the life of John Connally?  I don’t think so).  Cercas is a novelist, intellect, and historian all rolled into one, and he is sadly underrated in the United States.  There’s nothing quite like this book.  On top of everything else, if you can wade through the thicket, it is an excellent public choice account of autocracy.

Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: Religion of Protest.

Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life.  This vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation.  The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power.  The story is as gripping as a good novel.  Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state.  Still, this has received rave reviews and rightly so.

Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts.

Jacques Pepin, The Origin of Aids.

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Peoples, and their Regions.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.  Funny thing is, I read this on Kindle, didn’t have a physical copy to put in “my pile,” had no visual cue as to the continuing existence of the book, and thus I forget to cover it on MR.  I enjoyed it very much.

John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge.  This book covers Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.  A revelation, I loved it.  Could Gimlette be my favorite current travel writer?

Robert F. Moss, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.

Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II.

John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists, A History of Fiction in 294 Lives.  I’ll blog about this remarkable book soon.

What is striking is how many “big books” make this list, and that is exactly what you would expect in an age of Twitter, namely that a lot of shorter books are being outcompeted — aesthetically though not always economically — by on-line reading.

Here is the best “best books” list I’ve seen so far, apart from my lists of course.

I've been reading lots of year-end "best of" lists, from serious outlets that is, and these are the books which I see recurring with special frequency:

1. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

2. Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey.

3. David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

4. Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic.

5. Columbine, by David Cullen.

8. By Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.

9. Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.

10. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout.

I thought all of those were well done but Lords of Finance was the only one I loved.  My favorites are here and Lords arguably would be third on that non-fiction list of two.  In fairness to the authors I've only browsed Gordon Wood (report coming soon) and I haven't yet read Pops but suspect I might like it very much (report coming soon).

If you wish, you can dig into some of the book source lists I used for this meta-list here.  Have someone ready to throw you a rope.

Here are some "best albums" lists, if you wish to wade through those.  They are harder to aggregate and I haven't found a useful way of doing it.

Here is a left-wing list. Here is a National Review list, with Hayek and Robert Conquest near the top. Here are two Random House lists. The critics elevate Henry Adams, William James, and Booker T. Washington. The readers favor Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and John Lott. The readers’ list has all kind of libertarian books, including David Boaz and Tibor Machan. Thanks to the ever-interesting www.politicaltheory.info for the link. All of the lists make for fun browsing, especially once you start thinking about the contrasts.

You may recall I already posted my best non-fiction books and best fiction books of 2020.  But, unlike on previous lists, I didn’t pick a very best book of the year because in my gut I felt it had not yet arrived.  Now I have a top three, all of which came after I posted my original list.  Here are my top three picks for the year:

David S. Reynolds. Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.  At some point I vowed never to read another Lincoln biography, but this one won me over with its readability and also grasp of the broader cultural and political context.  You may know Reynolds from his excellent Walt Whitman book — could there be a better background to write on Lincoln?  Conceptual throughout.  At 932 pp. every page of this one is instructive, even if you feel sated in Lincoln as I did.

Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.  This is like the Lincoln biography — I was convinced I didn’t want to read a thousand pages about her (though I am a fan).  And yet I keep on reading, now at about the halfway mark and I will finish with joy.  This is one of the best and most gripping biographies I have read, covering growing up as a brilliant young woman in the 1950s, poetry back then, dating and gender relations amongst the elite at that time, how mental health problems were dealt with, and much more.

Jan Swafford, Mozart: the Reign of Love.  Self-recommending.  A wonderful biographer covers one of the most important humans, to produce the best Mozart biography of all time.  You may recall I also had high praise for Swafford’s Beethoven biography from 2014.

Those are my top three books of the year.  I think you can make a good case for Joe Henrich’s WEIRD book having the most important ideas of the year in it, but, perhaps because I already had read much of the material in article form, I didn’t love it as a book the way I do these.

Finally, I will note that the “best books lists” of other institutions have grown much worse, even over the last year.  A good list has never been more valuable, and please note my recommendations are never done to fill a quota, “achieve balance,” right previous wrongs, or whatever.  They are what I think are the best books.  Scary how rare that has become.

Here is the original non-fiction list, the original fiction list, and these are my post-Thanksgiving additions:

Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of Modernity.

John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Herself Alone, volume three.

Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love: A Memoir.

Bernardine Evaristo. Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel.  The Booker co-winner and yes the focus of black women’s gender-fluid lives in Britain sounds too PC, but I was won over.  There is a Straussian reading of it as well.

Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again: A Novel.

On the classical music front, Jean-Paul Gasparian’s Chopin CD is one of the best Chopin recordings ever, which is saying something.

The list of add-ons is I think a bit shorter than usual, which suggests that other people’s “best of” lists are declining somewhat in quality.  In essence I construct this add-on list by ordering the items off other people’s lists which I am not already familiar with.  I didn’t find so many undiscovered-by-me winners this time around, the Gubar and Strout being the main choices I drew from the discoveries of others.

I've read through the lists of many other sources, and these are the fictional works which recur the greatest number of times, in my memory at least:

1. Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs.

2. Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin.

3. Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply: A Novel.

4. David Small, Stitches: A Memoir.

By the way, via Literary Saloon, here is a French best books of the year list.  They pick Let the Great World Spin as the book of the year, non-fiction included.  I will be reading it soon.

My favorite works of fiction this year were the new Pamuk, Gail Hareven's The Confessions of Noa Weber, and A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias.

Fiction:

1. The da Vinci Code (in English)

2-9. All in English, four more Dan Brown titles plus Paulo Coelho, etc.

10. The da Vinci Code (in Arabic)

Non-fiction:

1. Easiest Way to Learn Arabic

The bottom line: English is the number one language here, and the natives truly are a minority.