My Book Report: 2017

8 min readDec 14, 2017

Hi, folks. I’m pleased to share a list of the books I read this year, along with some reflections. I’ve asked friends if they will also share their lists, so I’ll continue to add links to their lists at the bottom of this post. I encourage you to browse around a load up your reading (or gifting) list accordingly.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

by Nick Bostrom

Smart machines: they’re coming. I sort of assumed this was true, but after reading Superintelligence I’m one of the convinced, and I think it’s one of the most important issues in our world.

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who spends his time imagining every way he can think of that AI would act, and how we could guide and motivate it so it won’t decide to wipe us out. The book is large but rather readable, and doesn’t require prior knowledge on the topic. I found myself skipping sections that ran long but he makes sure you get the most important stuff.

If you don’t think machine intelligence will rival and surpass our own, I challenge you to step up to Bostrom and see if he can’t change your mind. Either way, it’s great fodder for freaking people out at dinner parties, and perhaps one of the most important issues ever.

Notes of a Native Son

by James Baldwin.

Originally published in 1955, this slim book is ten of Baldwin’s essays, and his first published non-fiction work. James Baldwin is one of the great modern thinkers on topics of race and culture in America, and his writing is elaborate, poetic, and surging with passion. I find Baldwin’s writing enchanting — it’s the beautiful craft of a painstaking craftsman. Especially at a time when civil rights are being threatened by our country’s highest leaders, Baldwin is a sage not to forget.

And don’t miss the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” that came out this year.

Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive

by Kristen J. Sollee

A friend pulled this out of her purse at dinner and I bought it that night. Sollee is the creator of the blog The Slutist. She’s a blogger, teacher at The New School, and to her, the witches, sluts, and feminists “embody the potential for self-directed feminine power, and sexual and intellectual freedom.”

She covers the legacy of the witch across cultures and histories, offers a modern witchey take on sexual politics and empowerment, looks at how Hillary became the “Wicked Witch of the Left.” and tells of occult anti-Trump protesters waving “Hex the Patriarchy” signs.

She’s not shy to build a book that reads a lot like a blog (with interviews, election politics, etc.), but it’s a bold piece of reading, likely empowering for many women, and for men a good step out of their comfort zone.

Consilience

by E.O. Wilson

There’s an amazing and quite massive used bookstore in Nashville called McKay’s, and it was while dopily wandering its long aisles that I found Edward Wilson’s Consilience. E.O. Wilson is an elder statesmen among naturalists. He is known for his extensive categorization of ant species, coining the term biophilia, and being a prolific sage. Consilience is an ambitious run at trying to create an interdisciplinary melding, “a new synthesis,” of the sciences and humanities. We can’t make sense of what science teaches us unless we can reconcile it with the arts, social sciences, civics, and so forth.

I think it’s brave for a scientist to write this way, and the book is inspiring. It also might make you feel better about your liberal arts degree, or inspire you to write more poems if you’re a scientist. Written in 1998, I don’t think the world paid too much attention to Consilience, which maybe is why you should.

Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession

by Studs Terkel

I found this one in the same McKay’s wandering, and it was hard to miss: a formidable hardcover with RACE in huge-point font on the spine. I knew Studs Terkel’s writings mostly from The People’s History of the United States, where Zinn quotes his intimate interviews with working class Americans.

Race is a powerful compendium of interviews Terkel conducted with white and black Americans across four decades. Published in 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected, it has a time capsule feel that I found fascinating. The language around race changes from decade to decade, but so many of the issues, anxieties, and troubles are the same.

Most voices in this book, black and white, agree that life for African Americans had gotten worse than it had been twenty years ago, with many citing the Reagan years as the cause: a cold warning that we may be dangerously backsliding again.

Since this is a book of interviews you can hop around at will, listening in on white union workers, mixed-race couples, a reformed Klansman, the mother of Medgar Evers, the wife of Dr. King, and everyday citizens voicing intimate and honest thoughts on our country’s racial psyche.

All About Love

by bell hooks

I’ve heard about bell hook’s work many years but hadn’t gotten into it. I chose All About Love because I’ve been asking myself questions about my emotional self, how I relate to people in my life, what love means to others, and how I understand my masculinity.

hooks is a feminist scholar, author, educator, and woman of color best known for taking on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, and social justice. But All About Love is basically a self-help book, in a good way; a surprisingly vulnerable and conversational book about loving and being loved. I found myself struggling to relate to a lot of it, but that’s probably because I struggle to relate to most of what people are looking for in love. The book felt like a good opportunity to do some deep listening and reflection on love in our difficult world.

Manhood in America

by Michael Kimmel

I spotted this one on the well-stocked shelves of a Nashville couple who are seminary students. They were hosting a backyard bonfire and I was doing a light lurk on their book collection. Manhood in America is fascinating, massively well researched, and very solidly written. It chronicles our models of masculinity as they change through the generations. What we’ve exalted as the masculine ideal in this country has gone through many eras, and is an ever-evolving thing, to be sure.

As a man, it’s freeing to see how social expectations have changed through time. This lets us see them as social norms, or even trends, not as immutable truths. More people have been opening their eyes recently to new realities, recognizing that gender and sexuality are more fluid and flexible, and that gender doesn’t end with man/woman, straight/gay. To navigate these new realities, we need to understand the history of how we’ve done our categorization and cast our role models. If you’re one of those many men who is suddenly asking yourself new, challenging questions about what your gender is all about, put this book on your list.

Note: Kimmel’s newest book is Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era.

Also, What About Men!?

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

by Phil Knight

A business mentor of mine who did design at Nike for years put this on my radar. I don’t read too many business books, but this one hit home unexpectedly. This is the story of the early Nike, starting in the sixties, before people ran for recreation or health, before the cult of the startup, before venture capital, and just as Asia was opening up to American business.

Knight was a track and field jock with an accounting background. He took a trip around the world as a naive young man and got hooked on the idea of importing running shoes from Japan. He vision was never a profound one. He just knew he had “a crazy idea” and wanted to build something huge if he could.

What I got from Shoe Dog was a treatise on perseverance: how hard it can be to build things, how dirty your hands can get, how many mundane battles need to be won, and that your struggles can last a really long time before the sun shines in. Nike took forever! If the company were started now I doubt anyone would stick around for as long as it took to build it back then.

Especially if you’re in the long slog on something you believe in, or thinking about doing something crazy, this war story might be just what you need.

Bossypants

by Tina Fey

Hell yes. She published this back in 2011 but it’s still so gorgeous and funny. More like a series of comedic essays, which makes is easy to pick up when you need it. Also lots of enticing views into the world of SNL during the time Fey was being Sarah Palin for the first time.

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reading Between the World and Me felt like a chance to sit still and practice my listening, moving slowly through Coates’ stanzas, being a silent witness to his telling of America’s metastasis of racial fury.

He’s writing to his young son, explaining what it was like growing up in Baltimore, finding the black intellectual Mecca of Howard University, finding himself as a journalist, and following the case of Prince Jones, a young model citizen who is killed by an officer under bizarre and infuriating circumstances.

You’ll find Coates’ writings in The Atlantic over the past few years, where he covers a broad swathe, but he’s best known for what he summons in Between the World and Me: a poetic, atheistic sermon on the great traumatic sadness, anger, and collective weight of an America at war with itself.

The Body Keeps the Score

by Bessel van der Kolk

It took me very much by surprise, but this is the one that had the biggest impact on me this year. If you were anywhere near me, you heard about it. Bessel van der Kolk is one of the most respected psychologists in the field of trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was first told about the book by my transgender sibling (likely all trans people can relate to at least some level of trauma), and have since had numerous friends find it greatly impactful.

Van der Kolk’s book is an anatomy of trauma, with an emphasis on the populations he knows best: combat veterans and victims of sexual violation. He outlines the neurological architecture of how trauma etches in the brain, and draws on his extensive first-hand clinical work to illustrate how it manifests in the mind and body. The second half of the book is a remarkable tour of the most effective and promising treatments for trauma. And it is indeed treatable, though we have a long way to go before we’re doing it well.

Why did I find this book so riveting and life-changing? It’s not because I identify as traumatized. I believe it’s because it showed me how much trauma shapes the world, and how through healing, the world can be that much brighter. It’s hard not to speculate that much of the rancor we face every day is the long, winding tail of deep psychological hurt living within us.

Call me when you’re done with The Body Keeps the Score. I’m far from tired of talking about it.