I started 2017 with the goal of reading more about neoliberalism. Donald Trump had just been elected, and George Packer's The Unwinding was ricocheting through my head.
But actually, looking back, I didn't really touch neoliberalism at all. Instead, 2017 was primarily a year dominated by a deeper inspection of the Soviet Union, centralized planning, and the tension between nature, nurture, and society. So, without further ado, my top five books of 2017.
1. Life and Fate
I remember exactly when I first heard about Life and Faith. It was summer in New York, and I was running on the West Side Highway listening to Invest Like the Best, one of my favorite podcasts. The host and guests tend to spend a lot of time talking about what they're reading and learning, and for whatever reason, the guest that day decided to mention this completely undiscovered classic of Russian Literature. They way he talked about the book, well, I guess it's the way that I talk about it too. I don't know exactly why it stuck with me, or what made it so compelling, but I find myself coming back to it almost every week, thinking about the characters and the writer.
In any case, reading an unheard-of 900-page Soviet book on a whim was a weird decision that could have gone terribly poorly. I need to revisit the book and write a more comprehensive review, and I'll do that sometime later, but in the meantime, anyone who wants to hear more should just ask me directly; I don't think I'll ever get tired of talking about this book.
2. Secondhand Time
I found this book on a balcony, talking about Life and Fate with a brilliant fellow reader. It's a stunning non-fiction book that won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Set in the years leading up to and following the fall of the Soviet Union, it's a beautiful piece of literature that challenges the simplistic American perspective on Russia and the end of the Cold War.
3. The Gene: An Intimate History
I remain convinced that genetics is one of the most challenging areas for modern human morality - we are all different, and how we deal with these differences is going to be the seminal challenge in bioethics and politics over the coming decades. This book is a quick, well-written history of genetics, that concludes with some of the most challenging questions that we have in front of us: What is natural in a world of genetic engineering? Are we prepared to deal with the moral implications of the things we may learn over the coming decades? What happens if we learn things that are true but distasteful?
4. The Three Body Problem
Others have summarized this better than me, but this is the seminal piece of science fiction from the past few years. It's stunningly creative, and interestingly foreign; written by a Chinese author, it's a very different style, with a sweeping perspective that slowly zooms out from micro to macro over the course of the book.
5. Seeing Like a State
The seminal "libertarian-leftist" bible, Seeing like a state is a full-throated rebuttal to centralized control and utopian projects. This is a book that everyone in a particular cluster of society has read, but no one else have ever touched. Overall, the book explores themes of legibility and control, and explores a thesis that increasing legibility often fails to acknowledge its fundamental hubris and has historically failed to build in enough buffer for the "unknown unknowns" that eventually doom its projects. If every art becomes a science, Scott writes a cautionary tale for the scientists of the world: especially in complex systems, the arts can sometimes be imbued with tribal knowledge which the science must appreciate to succeed.
