I reached my 2017 reading goal by the skin of my teeth: 52 books in 52 weeks. Some of those were repeats, including my yearly rereading of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) and The Righteous Mind, which top my “books everyone in the world should read” list.
But what were my favorite new discoveries?
Here, roughly in order, are my top 10 new reads of 2017, with a quote from each:
- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Finishing this book left me with the profound feeling of having had an experience as a reader, something I’ve felt at this level only a few other times (Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was another).
“And he was no longer trying to think. He just kept repeating to himself in despair, like a prayer, ‘I’m an animal, you can see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are — all powerful, all knowing, all understanding — figure it out! Look into my soul. I know — everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want — because I know it can’t be bad!’” - Thanks For the Feedback: the Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
This book might make it onto my yearly rereads list. It should be required reading for everyone who wants to cultivate a growth mindset.
“Receiving feedback sits at the intersection of these two needs — our drive to learn and our longing for acceptance.” - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
This would make an excellent intro to human psychology and possibly even philosophy. The section on errors and mistakes offers a particularly useful framework, and one I plan to discuss in the context of extreme sports for Blue Skies Magazine.
“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.” - The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The most beautiful, savage, brokenhearted, and breathtaking indictment of American race relations I’ve ever read.
“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” - Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
A brilliant, strange, unique, and influential sci-fi novel, different from any other I’ve ever read.
“But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.” - Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
I loved this book and found Gilbert’s conception of martyr energy vs jester energy transformational. It changed the way I view my relationship to my art.
“Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby. Everything I have ever written has brought me into being.” - The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski
A fascinating breakdown of terror management theory, which frames how humans have evolved mental tricks and techniques to stave off fear and live with the fact that We Are All Going To Die.
“Take all the cultural trappings away and we are all just generic creatures barraged by a continuous stream of sensations, emotions, and events, buffeted by occasional waves of existential dread, until those experiences abruptly end. But in a world infused with meaning, we are so much more than that.” - Reminiscences by Levi Coffin
Levi Coffin was known as the “President of the Underground Railroad”. A Quaker, he aided over 3,000 fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. This is his memoir, and it’s an incredible read. He admits in the beginning that he is no professional writer, but his plain and simple language tells a story of enough drama and intensity to keep anyone riveted. Throw this book in the face of anyone who says the American Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery.
“The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good book.” - The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
A great followup to Gilbert’s Big Magic. A Meditations or Tao Te Ching for writers and artists.
“We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know.” - Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (or read for free here)
Achingly beautiful poetry. Reading it, I discovered that my favorite lines from one of my favorite films —Welsh’s voiceover in The Thin Red Line: “If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours”—are apparently paraphrased from this work.
“If it is not my portion to meet thee in this my life then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight—let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.”
