2024 By The Books, Q4
Phew, this installment comes in very late! I had meant to it for a long time but somehow never got around to actually sitting down and writing it out, as life (and procrastination) got in the way. The utterly unpredictable consequence of this is that my mind was a little hazy when it came to recalling what the books I read more than half a year ago actually talked about. We’ll try to do better in the future! Either way, here are ten more books that I finished last year, of which my favorite one was probably Amos Oz’ memoir.
A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz
Beautiful story about the early days of Israel. It is sad yet hopeful, and masterfully depicts how Jews that had moved to Mandatory Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust were torn between the promised land and their ancestral roots (which lay in Eastern Europe). The book evokes the long-lost era of turn-of the-century high bourgeois society (personified by Amos’ great-uncle, the historian Joseph Klausner), into which many middle-class Jews thought they had successfully assimilated when disaster struck. Many of the book’s themes are still acutely relevant, and it’s a shining example of how to draw out the humanity of both sides of the conflict that, sadly, is still raging on some 80 years later.
The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing, Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer and Michael LeBoeuf
Very heavily focused on the American context. As the title indicates, this book will be singing the praise of Jack Bogle— don’t expect a balanced treatment of Vanguard’s track record here. That doesn’t mean their advice isn’t sound. Read this if you’ve already got your bases covered (which, to me, means that most of your savings are in a low-fee, passively managed, broad index fund), you can look for ways to further optimize your investment strategy here.
Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore
Delivers on its promises, but probably a little too basic for most readers with interest in the matter. Read it with a grain or two of salt — Blackmore is not a subject-matter expert, but has strong views on the matter that are shared by (I believe) a minority of the profession, e.g. illusionism (a quick summary of her views here). Whatever you make of her views, you got to respect her hair style.
Expecting Better, Emily Oster
You may guess that I read this book for a reason, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Not being too familiar with the overall literature on the subject, but having developed a rather keen sense of the general quality of advice that is being dished out around pregnancy, Oster’s book stands out as a guide that actually values mothers’ agency and quality of life. It’s somewhat shocking that this isn’t the norm, but in my experience providers (clinical or other) almost never acknowledge that there are tradeoffs between a pregnant person’s quality of life and risks to the fetus that are worth exploring. They do acknowledge tradeoffs for different procedures and practices to the baby, although a general tendency is that they routinely shy away from quantification — things are always safe or unlikely (“it never happened to me!”), and it’s left to the patient to figure out what exactly this may mean. For some reason, any risk (no matter how small) to the fetus is taken to justify pretty dramatic restrictions for expecting mothers, even if the evidence base is poor, as it’s often the case (e.g. the advice against drinking coffee).
Oster also has a Substack, ParentData, that is (hopefully) more up to date and covers an even wider range of topics, but of course it’s paid. My sense is that for a normal pregnancy, this book (plus some of the more traditional in-person birth classes) likely do the job. It goes without saying that it’s often worth getting a second opinion on some of the more controversial suggestions she offers (e.g. how much alcohol you can drink during pregnancy).
Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller
Apparently this was one of the early books arguing for behavioral economics? I read this before learning that this book is already 25 years old, and so at the time it seemed a bit like Captain Obvious blazing an already well-trodden trail. Either because of this, or because the book is written in such a self-serving tone, I didn’t enjoy this a great deal. Probably fine to skip if you’re already decently well read in behavioral economics (think Kahneman, Thaler, Gigerenzer, V. Smith).
Just Giving, Rob Reich
The canonical review of Reich’s rather qualified attack on private philanthropy is this Scott Alexander piece, which is as hilarious as it is unfair. (Conflict of interest note: Reich used to be on the board of my employer.) I was a little disappointed with the book as it doesn’t really say much about what type of philanthropy is good and praiseworthy and what parts need to be condemned. Put differently, you could use this book to argue both that almost all philanthropic activities need to be wiped off the face of the earth, or that Actually Things Are Fine as they work now. The only consistent critique (that I agree with) is about the way the law handles tax exemptions for donations, which are essentially regressive — wealthy donors can see their effective tax rate reduced much further than people with more limited means, even though it’s the former, not the latter, who have the power to actually shape society, however partially, through their donations.
End of the day I’m very gung-ho about philanthropy, as I find it difficult to imagine that the money that a certain Mr Microsoft is pumping into the Gates Foundation would be spent nearly as well if it instead went to the US government. The average foundation is probably a lot less effective than that, but I still believe that they have much stronger incentives to care about the outcomes of their spending than a federal agency ever could.
Jesus, Bart Ehrman
Maybe owing to the fact that I don’t know a whole lot about the early history of Christianity (would that even be the right term? Certainly Christianity as we know it today didn’t even exist when Jesus was preaching), this was an intriguing book, and its main thesis — that Jesus was very much an apocalyptic prophet, who strongly believed that the end was imminent — seemed well argued.
The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
I’ve only known SJ Gould through the lens of other authors; he’s famously the arch nemesis of Richard Dawkins and friends, so somewhere in the back of my mind I’d registered him as “the guy who’s wrong about everything in evolutionary biology because he tries to force the facts into a Marxist framework.” Well, folks, that’s a good reminder to read what people actually said, rather than how opponents describe their views! I found him overall quite sensible, and I very much appreciate that he so openly discusses his (political) biases in the book to let readers judge his arguments. He didn’t turn me into a group selectionist, but he did convince me that much of what got (gets?) classified as hard-nosed, empirical, data-driven “knowledge” in biology was (is?) derived from flawed measurement techniques.
Those They Called Idiots, Simon Jarrett
Not as good as I had hoped it to be. While it does make a strong case that “idiots” (what we might nowadays call mentally disabled people, people with learning disability, or some other term the euphemism treadmill has since generated) were more integrated into “normal” society than is the case today (the contrast is especially dramatic with respect to the middle of the 20th century, when swift institutionalization became the norm), it does not offer much in the way of theorizing, and as such fails to challenge the reader to rethink their attitudes towards the disabled.
Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright
More like “why certain teaching of certain version of Buddhism seems sensible, given what modern science has taught us”, but of course that doesn’t make for a catchy book title. Wright is the same guy who wrote “The Evolution of God”, and in my review I complained that he had left out Buddhist notions of “God” almost entirely from his writing. This book may explain that omission — recall that his story is that God has become ever more abstract as religions evolved away from anthropomorphic and polytheistic concepts that dominated early in our species’ history and towards an essence or sense of order, and he may think of (though he doesn’t explicitly say so) Buddhism as the culminating point of this evolution.
Also, he’s really into meditation! I don’t think this would work for me, but he got me very curious about meditation retreats and the places your mind (another illusion?) may go during those.
