Books of the Teens: Recommended Commentary and Personal Essays

Dear Reader, I may be parsing my non-fiction categories too finely, but this decade saw more non-fiction than fiction in my reading - 52% to be exact.  As you know, I posted about the memoirs I liked yesterday.  Today's post collects social commentary and personal essay collections I enjoyed in the twenty teens.

Best Commentary/Analysis

The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, 2012, read in 2012

A fascinating book unlocking secrets (hidden in plain sight) about how habits work in our lives.  Unfortunately, I didn't write this review right after I finished the book (as is my habit), so I had already forgotten some details by the time I did.  This is disrespectful treatment for what I would call the most memorable non-fiction book I read this decade.  The key framework is that habits work via a three-step process: a cue, followed by the routine, followed by a reward.   Duhigg applies this framework to everything from an afternoon cookie habit to alcoholism and gambling addiction.  Along with negative habits, Duhigg recounts how exercise and better eating habits can be cultivated and maintained.  He also covers organizational habits and how changing habits can change the fortunes of a company.  For this material, he cites Paul O'Neill's focus on safety when he arrived at Alcoa.  He also talks about why 12-step programs seem to work even though they lack any essential scientific soundness.  The author even tries to turn the book into a self-help book by publishing a "how to use this framework" section for the reader to attack personal habits or form new ones. If you pick up no other book from these recommendations, pick up this one.  That's what someone tells you when they mean it.

The Geography of Nowhere; The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, read in 2010

My good friend, Jason Hansen has generally different reading tastes than mine, but he recommended this book, and I'm glad he did. Kunstler may be a little crazy (he declared the end of the automobile age in this book 27 years ago), but he's smart crazy. The book outlines how land development evolved in this country and how we ended up with the crappy suburbs we have today. Kunstler grew up in Manhattan and now lives in small-town Saratoga Springs, NY. Because I also listened to his podcast (the Kunstlercast), It can be hard to remember what I heard there and what's in the book, but the book lays out what makes traditional urban fabric work and what makes the suburbs so dysfunctional. It's a seminal book by a unique thinker that will make some people muse "oh yeah" and others fling the book across the room. A the end of the decade, I still think within the framework Kunstler provides for evaluating a built landscape as I pass through it.  This can be a little tedious for my friends and family.


How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston, 2013, read in 2014

Although I had heard Baratunde Thurston on Fresh Air, it didn't register that he'd written a memoir in the form of a parody self-help book called How to Be Black.  I happened upon the book at the library on a "staff picks" shelf.  I'm really glad I picked it up.  Thurston, the online editor of The Onion, is very funny and brings social commentary in the most delightful way here.  In chapters like "How to be the Black Friend" and "How to be the Black Employee," he delves into the current and recent state of race relations in our country with acute observation, warmth and heaps of humor.  In addition to his own thoughts and experiences, he assembles a panel of black comedians, performers and writers (as well as Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like fame) to weigh in with their own insights.  An enjoyable read that made me think a lot and taught me some things about the black experience that I didn't know.  Reading this at the beginning of 2014 turned out to be significant timing.  The events of 2014 proved to be tragic for black men especially, and the decade did not improve form there.  In 2014, I also took in Dear White People, which frankly was not as cogent or straightforward as How to Be Black.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain, 2012, read in 2013

This book got lots of press when it came out, and I finally managed to get to it on my reading list and pick up a copy from the library a year later.  Now that I work in a software firm with lots of introverts, this book means more to me than when it made its initial impact.  It's a very interesting read in the vein of good business bestsellers with a tinge of self help.  Starting with research about how introverts and extroverts differ (chief takeaway - introverts are more sensitive to stimuli), she eventually touches on what you should do as a manager, spouse or parent of an introvert if you're an extrovert.  She makes compelling arguments that the world is tilted in favor of extroverted traits and that "shy" is a bad word.  She argues for making space for individual processing of ideas.  Split the tables apart in classrooms.  Let people work alone to generate ideas and then submit them.  This form of crowdsourcing is kinder to the introvert's pace of processing, but more importantly, it empirically produces more good ideas than group brainstorming.  

Against Football; One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, Steve Almond, 2014, read in 2015

Pittsburghers hear all kinds of creepy things about Ben Roethlisberger, especially earlier in his career.  Things that fall into the "Don't leave your daughter alone with the dude" category.  Then, of course, it really appears he got away with a bar bathroom sexual assault.  When that went down, I started finding it hard to root for the Steelers.  Then we saw first-hand disturbing abuse in the case of Ray Rice and Janay Palmer and the even-more disturbing light suspension initially imposed by the NFL.  Other examples followed.  Concussions have been ravaging current and, especially, retired players.  All of that made me essentially sit out the 2015 NFL season and then give it up altogether.  Since then, I've watched a game here and there to be social, with my boys, extended family or neighbors, and I've watched the Super Bowl.  After reading the book, I went on to write what may be the most-remembered post in this blog's history.  Steve Almond would probably call me a hypocrite for not giving it up completely.  In this short book, he lays out everything that's icky about football, starting with the NFL but also reaching into the college and high school games.  And there's a ton that's icky.  The writing is crisp and incredibly frank.  With this ammo, I have taken back my autumn weekend hours from football and skip all articles about the f-word in the paper.  That leaves more bandwidth for baseball and basketball, which I enjoy more in my forties anyway.  

Best Personal Essay Collections

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett, 2013, read in 2016

Having previously read an Ann Patchett novel (Bel Canto) and being married to a huge A.P. fan, I was intrigued by my friend Cassie Christopher's recommendation of Patchett's collection of essays.  This is one of those books that gets produced after an author has written enough magazine articles to collect them into a bound volume.  Except this may be the best.  One.  Ever.  Reading this book brought me so much pleasure.  It didn't really feel like reading.  It felt like listening to an interview - that's how completely Patchett conveys her own voice in simple, straightforward, unguarded writing.  More than that, it felt like sitting in the backyard talking with a good friend one has only just met.  I loved it.  The title essay is terrific (and cagily placed towards the end, its loaded title beckoning the reader).  Also memorable were:  "My Road to Hell was Paved," which starts as a cheesy magazine assignment to rent an RV, drive around for a week and write about it.  That could be a disaster or a bore, but not in Patchett's hands.  Also, "The Mercies" about Patchett's adult relationship with her first grade teacher.  She's such an interesting person and such a fabulous writer.  This book was a joy.


Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015, read in 2016

Having enjoyed and learned a lot from Ta-Nehisi Coates's work in The Atlantic, I was really interested to read his book.  Framed as a letter to his son, it's a frank mixture of memoir and advice to him.  Coates deploys language so masterfully that the book feels like a 150-page poem.  The violence and lack of control Coates describes in being a black boy and man in this country can be devastating.  A friend who read this before I did said she needed time to process what she was taking in while reading it.  Between the World and Me can bring outsiders into the experience of being a black man in America without the hallucinatory pretension of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.


Liturgy of the Ordinary; Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, Tish Harrison Warren, 2016, read in 2018
 
Tish Warren wrote this book before she joined the clergy of our church.  Then it won Christianity Today's book of the year.  These events have made her arrival - job sharing with her also-ordained husband - pretty exciting. The book - with the first edition's evocative peanut butter and jelly cover art - steps the reader through the day in 11 chapters, starting with "Waking," discussing in Warren's open, confessional tone how we can worship and celebrate in the midst of everyday life.  The theme is that although we have liturgy to guide our worship on Sundays, each day has its own liturgy of things that we should be careful to notice and embrace.  Actually, some of the items here, we need to exercise caution that we're not taken over by them.  Other chapters include "Losing Keys," "Checking Email," and "Fighting with my Husband."  See, I told you her tone was open and confessional.  I read this book one or two chapters at a time between other books, and I enjoyed consuming it that way.  Warren's writing is clear as a bell.  Simple word choices making up clear sentences building into well-structured paragraphs.  I took great pleasure in the quality of the writing, and it enhanced what I got out of the book - which is that this life is fleeting and that a default mode of focusing on the negative or self-seeking will make it flee that much faster and less satisfyingly.


We Were Eight Years in Power; An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017, read in 2018

Clearly, if I could only take the works of two authors to a desert island, it would be Patchett and Coates.  Now, I kinda want to go to a desert island.  As a category, books that compile previously-published materials have an uneven track record.  In this unique volume, Coates, a modern-day prophet, selects eight essays and long-form articles he wrote for The Atlantic during the eight years of the Obama presidency.  Rather than just publish that group by itself, though, he has written an introductory essay for each of those pieces in which he remembers and analyzes the events of his personal life during that period and/or what it took to create the work we are about to read.  Or, in my case, re-read.  But actually, in my case, not re-read.  I had read all of the original essays/articles contemporaneously when they were published in the Atlantic, so I gave myself permission to read the intros but skip the essays and still count it as rereading the book. As a completist, this was both death-defying and rather satisfying.  Reading these essays and remembering the pieces and the period in which they were written was moving and throught-provoking.  I call Coates a prophet because he interprets what's going on in the culture in a way that I don't hear others doing it.  And yet, he's a prophet for our time because his writing tends to the personal and sometimes confessional.  Reading him feels like having a very smart, interesting friend, and that's never more true than in We Were Eight Years in Power.