2020 was a busy year - and so I'm writing my top five books list in February, 2022 - fourteen months late....I'm also ~20 reviews behind on Goodreads. Not a good sign...
Anyway, doing this is how I stay on top of my reading; producing, not simply consuming, and drawing the connections between books that make reading fun.
Turns out there's a reason why this is considered one of the best American novels. It was a well-written story with characters who were frustratingly relatable in frightening and intriguing ways. Hard to say more than what's already been said, but for me, the beautifully oblique way that the unreliable narrator slowly revealed information over time so that I was constantly trying to figure out what was going on and how reality was being filtered through the narration, as well as the tragic interconnectedness between all of the characters was simply sublime.
This book is a solid meditation on two formations of liberalism - the progressive liberalism of Dewey and Whitman set up against the anarchist, Marxist liberalism of the anti-Vietnam 60s. It's the final act of a philosopher who embodies one of my favorite traditions, American Pragmatism, and is of particular relevance in its prescient analysis of the dangers of hyper-woke politics.
A very engaging and beautiful story of the discovery of DNA and the invention of microbiology as a sub-field. The greats like von Neumann and Watson and Crick and Monad and Schrodinger show up, but as humans, people, working on science, not as members of the pantheon. More than anything, this is an ode to the power of theory - and to Francis Crick, the ultimate theoretician. Pairing nicely with The Innovator's Solution, it's a book I go back to regularly, wondering why we haven't cracked the code past the Central Dogma...multicellular life is just fundamentally...different.
Ah, Christensen - the first business theorist I really jived with. Read his Innovator's Dilemma years ago, and this is a great update, extending his theories of modularity and integration (very Kuhnian in his own way). As a consummate defender of big businesses, working from the inside, he did a good job describing how to invert the paradox he identified earlier.
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