Books

This is only the second time I’m publishing a list of books I read. I started doing this in 2021 – here’s the list for that year – partly because I had never kept such a list before, and, perhaps, partly because of covid. Here’s this year’s list with an updated introduction to last year’s post.

I read a lot. I own more than one thousand books, and I regularly cull my library. I also enjoy watching movies and TV – in the past year, I’ve been watching more, though the streaming services haven’t been great. (One exception is Mubi, which has arthouse films and foreign films. This link will get you a free month to try it out, and extend my subscription by one month.)

This year, I read more than 140 books, up on 2022. I read fairly quickly, and some of them – mostly mysteries and thrillers – were books I read in a single evening, or two at most. Some of the books were fairly short, but others were quite long. And I left a few books in the list that I abandoned after about one quarter of their length, just as notes to remind me that I didn’t finish them. Books with asterisks before the titles are recent books, published in the last year or so (at the time of my reading). I often read multiple books concurrently, so there are a few in the 2022 list that I haven’t finished. I only started the last book on the list on December 30, so I haven’t gotten for, but I’ll include it anyway.

You’ll notice a number of books in French; I lived in France for nearly three decades, so read in French regularly, mostly classical literature. Many of these French books are long, and I read a bit less quickly in French than in English. One of my goals for 2022 was to read more in French, and I did so. You’ll also notice a number of plays; I list each one of these as a book even though they aren’t as long as books.

About half my reads were non-fiction, though I haven’t included cookbooks or some books I’ve read for my work. And this also doesn’t count a few dozen photobooks that “read” or “re-read,” since I don’t really count them as reading. Though perhaps if I keep a list next year, I will include them…

My big project for the coming year might be Dickens. I’ve never gotten into his work, and decided to give him another chance with David Copperfield, which I began reading on December 30. Check back next year to see if I’ve read more than one of his novels.

If I’d had more time, I’d include Amazon affiliate links for anyone who wants to contribute to my ongoing book habit. Since I’m not including individual links, if you go to your local Amazon with these links (if you shop from one of these three countries), I’ll get a small percentage: Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon FR.

So, here’s the list:

1. *The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki
2. Essence of the Heart Sutra, Dalaï Lama
3. The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, Anthony Gottlieb
4. Shobogenzo, Dogen
5. *Dogen: Japan’s Original Zen Teacher, Steven Heine
6. The Iliad, Homer (Caroline Alexander)
7. *Upholland, Michael Kenna
8. *Metabolical, Robert Lustig
9. Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Jules Verne
10. Poems of the Masters, Red Pine
11. The Platform Sutra, Red Pine
12. Walking, Erling Kagge
13. *Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel
14. The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, tr. Red Pine
15. Bitters, Brad Thomas Parsons
16. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
17. Philosophy in the Garden, Damon Young
18. On Getting Off: Sean and Philosophy, Damon Young
19. Shakespearean, Robert McCrum
20. Life, Part Two, David Chernikoff
21. The Russia House, John Le Carré
22. Les Mouches, Jean-Paul Sartre
23. Huis Clos, Jean-Paul Sartre
24. L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être, Milan Kundera
25. Morts sans sépulture, Jean-Paul Sartre
26. La Putain réspectuese, Jean-Paul Sartre
27. *Modern Instances, Stephen Shore
28. Marguerite Duras, Laure Adler
29. Putin’s People, Catherine Belton
30. Les mains sales, Jean-Paul Sartre
31. The Taijiquan Classics, Barbara Davis
32. There Are No Secrets, Wolfe Lowenthal
33. Appeasing Hitler, Tim Bouverie
34. Dreaming Yourself Awake, B Alan Wallace,
35. Call for the Dead, John Le Carré
36. *How to Be Perfect, Michael Schur
37. Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire
38. Inner Work, Robert Johnson
39. The Red Book, CG Jung
40. L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Jean-Paul Sartre
41. Les mandarins I, Simone de Beauvoir
42. Le soleil naît derrière le Louvre, Léo Malet
43. The Broker, John Grisham
44. The Street Lawyer, John Grisham
45. The Archer Files, Ross McDonald
46. *To You: Zen Sayings of Kodo Sawaki
47. Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham
48. Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (Cleary)
49. To You, Kodo Sawaki
50. Deep Blues, Robert Palmer
51. *Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes
52. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat
53. Au bord de l’eau, Shi Nai-an, Luo Guan-zhong
54. *After Steve, Tripp Mickle
55. Climbing the Steps to Qingcheng Mountain, Wang Yun
56. The Tai Chi Book, Robert Chuckrow
57. Tai Chi Concepts and Experiments, Robert Chuckrow
58. Life for Sale, Yukio Mishima
59. In the Court of King Crimson, Sid Smith
60. The Cut, Christopher Brookmyre
61. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
62. *How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, Rowan Hooper
63. The Bird Way, Jennifer Ackerman
64. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
65. Sky Above, Great Wind, Kazuaki Tanihasi
66. Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, Christie Aschwanden
67. Awakened Cosmos, David Hinton
68. The Partner, John Grisham
69. *The Cut, Christopher Brookmyre
70. Silverview, John Le Carré
71. Armadillo, William Boyd
72. Casanova, Maxime Rovere
73. L’anomalie, Hervé le Tellier
74. *Reality+, David Chalmers
75. Galileo’s Error, Philip Goff
76. Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke
77. At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell
78. The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
79. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
80. The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien
81. L’Age de raison, Jean-Paul Sartre
82. *How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates
83. *The Awoken, Katelyn Monroe Holmes
84. *Suspect, Scott Turow
85. Crow with No Mouth, Ikkyū
86. Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf, Zen Poems of Ryokan
87. Wabi-sabi, Leonard Koren
88. *The Mindful Photographer, David Ulrich
89. Camino Island, John Grisham
90. Camino Winds, John Grisham
91. Wabi Sabi, Further Thoughts, Leonard Korean
92. In Praise of Shadows, Junichciro Tanizaki
93. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke
94. Ways of Seeing, John Berger
95. The Beauty of Everyday Things, Soetsu Yanagi
96. Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self, Claire Tomalin
97. *Lessons, Ian McEwan
98. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Jon Chang
99. The Guardians, John Grisham
100. Mortality, Christopher Hitchens
101. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, Jonathan Gould
102. Entretiens, Cioran
103. Sur les cimes du désespoir, Cioran
104. The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr
105. The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith
106. Entretiens avec Sylvie Jaudeau, Cioran
107. Cioran ou le Dernier Homme, Sylvie Jaudeau
108. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
109. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, Jessica Brody
110. *The Last Chairlift, John Irving
111. *Life Time, Russel Foster
112. Le livre des leurres, Cioran
113. Upgrade, Blake Crouch
114. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm
115. The Summons, John Grisham
116. The Rainmaker, John Grisham
117. The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
118. The Romantic, William Boyd
119. The Racketeer, John Grisham
120. *The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem, Matthew Hollis
121. The Last Juror, John Grisham
122. Life Is Hard, Kieran Setiya
123. Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith
124. Le mythe de Sisyphe, Albert Camus
125. Apology, Plato
126. Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
127. Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith
128. The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, Red Pine
129. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
130. Beethoven for a Later Age, Edward Dusinberre
131. *The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
132. The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura
133. The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, tr. Red Pine
134. A Murder of Quality, John LeCarre
135. Zen questions, Zazen, Dogen, and the spirit of Creative Inquiry by Taigen Dan Leighton
136. One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan
137. *A Very Nice Girl, Imogen Crimp
138. Watchmen, Alan Moore
139. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore
140. Bread, Ed McBain
141. Les précieuses ridicules, Molière
142. Hamlet (Q1), William Shakespeare
143. Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright
144. No One Knows, JT Ellison
145. Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan
146. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

I’ve never before kept a list of books I read. I read a lot, but I don’t generally want to keep score. I know a lot of people do this on sites like Goodreads, but I’ve never felt it was useful. However, at the beginning of the year, seeing some articles about what people read last year, I decided that, out of curiosity, I would keep a list.

As I said, I read a lot. I’m not a big television or movie watcher; many people have a reflex to watch TV every evening, but in my household, that’s not the case. My partner is also an avid reader, though we read different types of books. We follow a few TV series, watch the occasional movie, but I let my Netflix subscription lapse often because there’s nothing that interests us.

So I guess it’s not surprising that I read more than 130 books last year. I read fairly quickly, and some of them – mostly mysteries and thrillers – were books I read in a single evening, or two at most. Some of the books were fairly short, but others were quite long. And I left a few books in the list that I abandoned after about one quarter of their length, just as notes to remind me that I didn’t finish them; these are indicated by asterisks after titles. Books with asterisks before the titles are books that I started in 2020, and only finished in 2021. I often read multiple books concurrently, so there are a few in the 2021 list that I haven’t finished, but, if I keep a list in 2022, I’ll indicate that. I only started the last book on the list on December 31, so I haven’t gotten for, but I’ll include it anyway.

You’ll notice 16 books in French; I lived in France for nearly three decades, so read in French regularly, but mostly classical literature. Many of these French books are long, and I read a bit less quickly in French than in English. One of my goals for 2022 is to read more in French, notable more Balzac, Dumas, and other 19th century authors that I particularly like.

About half my reads were non-fiction, though I haven’t included cookbooks or some books I’ve read for my work. And this also doesn’t count a few dozen photobooks that “read” or “re-read,” since I don’t really count them as reading. Though perhaps if I keep a list next year, I will include them…

If I’d had more time, I’d include Amazon affiliate links for anyone who wants to contribute to my ongoing book habit. Since I’m not including individual links, if you go to your local Amazon with these links (if you shop from one of these three countries), I’ll get a small percentage: Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon FR.

So, here’s the list:

Read more

This weekend, I started reading This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. He is a neuroscientist who had previously been a professional musician, and the book explores why we enjoy music and how it affects the brain.

It started off interestingly, showing that this was a book by a scientist exploring a topic in which he had personal experience. But then I got to a few areas where he made ridiculous statements, a couple of which were outlandish, and one that was just false. This showed that the book had not been fact checked, and made me wonder about everything else in it: if there were mistakes like this, they cast doubt on everything the author says.

The author was discussing the way information is stored in the brain, comparing it with the way data is stored on computers. He says:

People who work with image files all the time are able to look at the stream of 0s and 1s and tell something about the nature of the photograph—not at the level of whether it is a human or a horse, perhaps, but things like how much red or gray is in the picture, how sharp the edges are, and so forth. They have learned to read the code that represents the picture.

This is simply ridiculous. You cannot tell anything about the contents of any file from “the stream of 0s and 1s.” You could tell something about some types of files if you look at the hexadecimal interpretation of those 0s and 1s, but only if they contain metadata (such as the type of file, the creation date, etc.). There is nothing in a file that gives you any idea of its contents by simply looking at the raw data.

He doubles down shortly after the above statement:

Similarly, audio files are stored in binary format, as sequences of 0s and 1s. The 0s and 1s represent whether or not there is any sound at particular parts of the frequency spectrum. Depending on its position in the file, a certain sequence of 0s and 1s will indicate if a bass drum or a piccolo is playing.

I think the only polite thing that I can say is that this is fantastical. The idea that “a certain sequence of 0s and 1s” in any way suggests which instrument is playing, which note is played, or anything at all is ludicrous. Audio files are sampled 44,100 per second, meaning that in each second of music, there are 44,100 discrete segments, combined in “frames,” of audio data. Each of these frames of data contains an abstraction of the sound, and it is not broken up into sections for which instrument is playing, what note is played, etc. The fact that a scientist can write this, and that a publisher fact checked it, is literally beyond belief.

Finally, there’s this:

The research on the development of the first MRI scanners was performed by the British company EMI, financed in large part from their profits on Beatles records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might well have been titled “I Want to Scan Your Brain.

Alas, this is the kind of thing that, perhaps, one may have remembered hearing, but that a fact checker should have corrected. It was the CT scan that EMI developed; the history of the MRI is quite complex and took a long time to become a viable diagnostic tool. It began in the 1950s, and took a couple of decades to become useful.

It is beyond disappointing to read this sort of error. I know about these things, and was able to detect them, but I don’t know much about the other things – such as how the brain works – that the author discusses. So there’s no way of knowing whether he is correct, and I simply cannot read a scientific book with this doubt in my mind.